


And The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter

by malapropism



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon-Divergentish, Canon-Typical Racism, Canon-Typical Violence, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Dreams, Dreamsharing, F/M, Folklore, Generalized Self-Loathing, Gothic, Horror, M/M, Magical Realism, Masturbation, Post-The Raven King, Religion, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sexual Content, Suicide Attempt, Trees (But Don't Worry; No One Talks To Them)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-09-02 07:21:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8657869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malapropism/pseuds/malapropism
Summary: This is a story about dreams and the boys who have them. It is also the story of a poison tree.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from _The Waste Land_ by T.S. Eliot. While writing and editing this story, I listened to these albums a lot: _Blonde_ by Frank Ocean, _Plowing Into the Field of Love_ by iceage, _Telling It Like It Is_ by Marching Church, and _Wowee Zowee_ by Pavement. For other assorted ephemera related to this story, see [this](http://ababelofprose.tumblr.com/tagged/the-poison-tree-story).
> 
> This all began as a prompt from EssayOfThoughts, in response to a “fic I’ll never write” meme. Of course, I ended up writing it, to the tune of…a lot of words. I am very grateful for their constant encouragement and for the idea itself. noiselesspatientspider beta’d this, saving y'all (as always) from too many italics and some truly dubious storytelling. I honestly overstate how much their humor and insight helps me as I write. All remaining errors, italics, and melodramatic flourishes are my own.

I was angry with my friend;  
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.  
I was angry with my foe:  
I told it not, my wrath did grow. 

And I waterd it in fears,  
Night & morning with my tears:  
And I sunned it with smiles,  
And with soft deceitful wiles. 

And it grew both day and night.  
Till it bore an apple bright.  
And my foe beheld it shine,  
And he knew that it was mine. 

And into my garden stole,  
When the night had veild the pole;  
In the morning glad I see;  
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

\- “A Poison Tree” by William Blake

### I. 

“I am almost entirely certain that wasn’t here yesterday,” Gansey said. He gestured vaguely toward the black-branched tree in the middle of the living room. “In fact, I’m positive. I pride myself on keeping track of all strange arboreal happenings, considering our track record.”

Adam rolled his eyes.

They stood in the living room, all five together before they splintered into three (Henry, Blue, Gansey) and two (Adam, Ronan) and then one (Adam, to New Haven) and one (Ronan, the lone guard of Henrietta). It was the summer of parting. Adam had greeted the westward-bound trio with a sigh. “Come see what Ronan’s done,” he had said.

“Dreamt it,” Ronan answered off-handedly.

The tree stretched skyward and seemed to obey no earthly law. As Gansey carefully circled its trunk, he regarded it appraisingly. At first glance, he imagined that he might easily wrap his arms around its width; the closer he ventured, the more impossible this seemed. He shivered in the still air.

Its branches curled in intricate, swirling knots. While he knew rationally that the tree must be contained by the height of the room, it somehow seemed to surpass the ceiling. It was as if the roof was not there at all, and yet it plainly was.

“Does it have roots?” Blue asked curiously, walking towards the tree and studying where it sprang from the carpeted floor.

“They’re in the basement,” Ronan said. He shrugged. “Found ‘em after I woke up.”

“And you’re entirely unfazed by the tree growing out of your coffee table,” Adam said, turning to Ronan. He seemed to be continuing a debate broken by the others’ arrival.

Ronan’s lips curled in a wordless sneer. It lacked teeth.

Henry cleared his throat. “Do you remember what you dreamed about?”

Ronan met his eye coolly. The others had taken to Henry but Ronan had seemed to resent his presence as an intrusion of the highest order. This resentment, which roiled off his skin in thick waves and often erupted in a sort of characteristic caustic cruelty, had been the subject of a recent stinging argument with Blue.

She and Henry had come to Monmouth to help the boys gather up the detritus of their school days because Gansey had gone and sold the building in that last-ditch effort to keep Ronan from drifting away. It worked, in that he graduated with the rest of them, but it was a stopgap measure. The damage was done, and Ronan would drift as he pleased. Gansey bristled at this.

That day, everyone was irritable. Their skin prickled with grief and the summer sun high over Henrietta. Sweat rolled down the fangs of Ronan’s tattoo, staining the thin fabric of his shirt; Blue caught Gansey eyeing the bared skin of his ribs, visible through a rip in the arm. She smirked.

Henry and Adam had trudged up the stairs to carry down the last load of boxes – the Noah boxes, which Ronan refused to touch and which Gansey would not permit to be left behind – out to the pick-up truck, borrowed for this purpose from a friend of Maura’s. Gansey leaned stiffly against the Pig, squinting into the sun. Ronan kicked up clods of dirt, tearing out the straggly threads of grass growing in the asphalt cracks. Dust rose up restless from the pavement.

“Quit that,” Blue said sharply. “Can’t you just chill for a minute?”

By way of answer, Ronan launched a large tangled chunk of dirt and root in her direction. He watched its trajectory, grinning wickedly as it crumbled at her feet.

“Fucking hell, Ronan!” she spat.

Ronan turned to look at Gansey, who shook his head slightly. Ronan’s expression immediately soured, but he stilled his feet.

“Whatever,” he said. “I’m bored. They’ve been up there forever.”

“It’d go faster if you’d make yourself useful,” Blue snapped.

“It’d go faster if you hadn’t brought your friend along,” Ronan replied, disdainful. “He’s slowing us down.”

Before Blue could bite back, Ronan continued. Relentless, he contorted his face into an ugly snarl and put on his cruel mimicry of Henry: “Oh, how can I help? Where should this go? Gansey, Gansey, don’t leave me – “

She lunged forward, pinning him against the building. He let himself hit the brick. He could have pushed back – she was so much smaller than he was – but he didn’t. He pressed the backs of his palms to the wall in a gesture of surrender. Her eyes were wide with shock and anger but her voice held steady. “Ronan Lynch, I swear to – “

“Blue.”

Gansey had jumped off the Pig and made towards the two of them but it was Henry who spoke. He stood in the shadow of Monmouth, his eyes blinking fast against the summer light and his arms laden with two bulky, carefully labeled boxes.

Blue, who had turned at the sound of her name, dropped her arms. “You didn’t – did you?” she asked faintly. Ronan shifted, his face blank and his shoulders slack.

“Yes,” Henry said. “I heard him.”

“I’m sorry,” Gansey said automatically. “He – “

“Doesn’t need you making excuses for him,” Henry finished. “He’s all grown-up, you know.”

The tips of Gansey’s ears went pink.

Henry set his boxes down and deliberately walked towards Ronan. Adam hung back, framed by the entrance to Monmouth.

“It’s funny, is it,” Henry said. “The way I talk.”

Ronan did not reply.

“Go on then. Do your best one. Let’s have it, because I’ve certainly never heard this before! No one’s ever made fun of the kid with the accent.”

“Look, I didn’t mean for you to hear that,” Ronan said.

“Well, if you didn’t mean for me to hear it,” Henry said. “Then it’s just fine.”

“That’s not what I meant – “

“Of course you didn’t. You never do. None of them ever mean it. But here’s the thing – I don’t have to pretend to like you anymore. I don’t have to pretend that I didn’t hear it, or that I’m in on the joke. I don’t have to pretend that it’s funny. Because I’m done with you, with this place.” He looked off in the direction of Aglionby for a moment, before turning back to Ronan. “I don’t need shit from you and I’m not going to take shit from you.”

Ronan’s expression darkened and briefly, it seemed certain that he would protest. He met Henry’s gaze.

“You’re right,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry.”

“Doesn’t make it any better,” Henry replied.

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “I get that.”

The five of them loaded up the truck and the Pig in silence. The sun blistered.

 

A few weeks had passed since that afternoon, the specter of which lingered. Ronan seemed genuinely remorseful, and he had immediately quit his cruel attacks. Henry, for his part, was characteristically pleasant to Ronan in passing but had made it clear to both Blue and Gansey that he had no real desire to spend much time around Ronan Lynch.

Henry repeated his question. “Do you remember anything?”

“It was in my dream,” he replied after a beat. “The tree. But it was back in – in the burnt Cabeswater. Everything was burnt. I don’t remember what it does, or why I dreamt it. Or why it’s here.”

“It’s creepy and it’s probably trying to kill us. Of course you brought it home,” Blue said.

“I didn’t mean to,” Ronan said defensively.

“It looks familiar,” Gansey ruminated. “The knots, they’re…”

“Celtic,” Ronan said, almost reluctantly. “Crann bethadh. Tree of life.”

“Some tree of life,” Adam said. “It looks like it’s straight out of hell. Looks like it’s dead.”

“I don’t know,” Henry offered, walking up to the tree carefully. “It doesn’t – it doesn’t feel dead.”

“Don’t touch it,” Gansey said, panic crowding his consonants. “I don’t know why, but don’t. Ronan’s dreams can be…dangerous.”

Adam glanced at Ronan, who seemed untroubled by Gansey’s remark and the tree alike. He lay stretched out on the couch, staring fixedly up at the ceiling.

Adam still found himself hungry for the sight of Ronan. They had kissed and done more besides but Ronan still felt very far away at times. Adam wondered if he would ever be satisfied – if he would ever be certain that Ronan was real, and that he wanted him back, barring those moments in which they were pressed bodily against each other. Sometimes when he looked at Ronan he was seized with this horrible leaping urge to wrap his arms around Ronan’s ribs and find their breaking point. Sometimes he wanted to lock the two of them away in Ronan’s little room here at the top of the stairs and stay inside alone until they both had died and rotted away and the flesh had dried up on their bones and the maggots had come and picked them each clean. Sometimes he daydreamed about wide swathes of empty arid land and iced mountaintops and other such desolate vistas to be taken in only by the two of them. Only them. There was some aching charm to being the last to walk this earth and he dreamed of the apocalypse too. Sometimes he did not want to leave in the fall. Sometimes he felt that it was Ronan who was leaving him. It was paradoxical to fear this when he was the one heading north and yet and yet and yet.

Adam banished such thoughts with a steadying breath. He leaned closer to a low-hanging branch, which resembled polished onyx more than any familiar grain.

Suddenly, all at once, the branches began to shiver. They strained from their knots and extended four vine-like tendrils in invitation to Gansey, Adam, Blue, and Henry. Gansey jumped back, unthinkingly reaching toward Blue. She shook him off and stepped forward again, standing apace with Adam. As they moved their respective vines followed, quivering at eye-level.

“Not so dead after all,” Henry said into the hollow silence.

Ronan, the only vineless among them, didn’t rise from the couch. But the studied languor had drained out of his bones and his eyes flickered in recognition, as if tugged by the thread of a dream. His lips parted, words half-formed on his tongue, and then –

Four apples blossomed on the outstretched branches, bright and beguiling.

“What,” Gansey said wondrously. He reached out towards his apple, tongue absently caught between his teeth.

“Don’t touch it,” Ronan snapped, echoing Gansey’s own admonition. He got to his feet.

“I don’t ever think I’ve seen something so red,” Henry said. “It’s like – like a dream.”

Blue laughed softly. Her eyes were slightly out-of-focus. The fruits swayed in an unfelt breeze, blown in from some alien plane.

“I think we’re supposed to pick them,” Adam said.

“Yes,” Blue said. Gansey and Henry nodded at once.

“No,” Ronan said, fear astringent in his voice.

“We’re supposed to,” Adam said again. He looked momentarily dazed by his own words, as if he was not fully conscious of speaking.

Ronan stepped directly in front of Adam and the apple hung between them. He grabbed Adam by the shoulders and shook him forcefully.

“Stop it!” he said.

Adam’s eyes cleared briefly. “I can’t,” he said, his voice suddenly hoarse. He shuddered. The spasm of clarity went as quick as it’d come. Ronan stepped back in horror.

“Let’s,” Henry said. His fingers fluttered at his side.

“Yes,” Blue repeated, mirroring his gesture.

Silence fell, punctuated only by the rustle of the unseen leaves, which shivered violently in that otherworldly gale. And then Adam reached out and tore his apple from the vine.

Gansey screamed, and sound returned to the room with a vengeance. He fell to the floor with a horrible crash but only Ronan seemed to notice. He ran to Gansey, whose very veins seemed to contract as Henry and Blue ripped their apples free.

 “Stop!” Ronan said again, desperate. His plea was addressed as much to the three with their fruits as to Gansey, who continued to howl. Ronan pressed his hands to Gansey’s chest in a distraught attempt to soothe or still him. Gansey contorted under the touch and he did not stop.

Whatever devil’s snare unleashed by their actions continued to unfold in its horrible inevitability.

Henry took the first bite, then Adam. Then Blue, who had half-turned at the sound of Gansey’s redoubled cries, although she did not move from the spot to which she seemed almost rooted.

In those brief seconds the transformation occurred.

Branches spiraled through the air. The shadow-dark tendrils wove their way around each of the three, reweaving their intricate knots until they had disappeared into the thicket.  In short order the tree had swallowed them up whole. The branches sank deep into the floor and they made no sound as they went.

Each of the new trees – with its human core – was now connected to the original by feather-thin roots that crawled along the floor. A curious burntness lingered in the air. Ronan felt royally seasick, as if the whole world had been turned upside down or inside out or perhaps both; he felt that he had been witness to a horrible violation of the natural order.

Gansey, who had gone silent, began to spit up a thick yellow bile. He stirred and drug a heavy hand across his lips. A long, cloudy strand of spit followed his fingers.

“What just happened,” he said. “Everything – it feels wrong.”

Ronan stared at the Adam-vine.

“Ronan,” Gansey said. “Ronan.”

He turned to face Gansey and his horror was plain.

“I think,” he said. “I killed them.”

 

He dreamed of a hatchet that night and when he woke, he was surprised to find his hands empty.

In the dream he appeared in the middle of an unfamiliar forest. The trees towered infinite and he could not see the sky. The scene was a sort of murky grey, like the clouded reflection of an old mirror. Without sun or guiding star he could not navigate but he knew in his bones that the way out was forward. He walked for hours but never tired.

Eventually he arrived at a clearing. In the middle of it was a black-branched tree. The air carried no scent (just as there was no sound to be heard, just as anything he touched turned to smoke under his fingers, save the hatchet, surely this was a dream) but all the same he knew that it smelled like burning things.

He walked up to the tree and he swung the little hatchet over his shoulder. He felt that he should fell the tree. He braced himself in the grey dirt.

He drove the cutting blade into the tree once, twice, again. The trunk began to weep milky tears. They were the brightest thing in this world of grey and they made him sick to behold. He sank the hatchet into the tree again and again. Tears flowed from the rough wound.

He knew he was done when the trunk opened up like a blown pupil. There was a brief awful moment in which nothing happened – and something was supposed to happen, he knew this too. Then the moths came.

Bright white winged things streamed out of the tree in an endless horde. He stumbled back to avoid their spiraling flight. They went up and up and up. The grey clouds above were dispelled by their beating wings, which breathed new air into the stillness. The moths were as white as the tree’s tears.

At some great height the moths began to coalesce in a shivering orb not unlike his memory of the absent moon. As he regarded their cohesion he fell forward into nothingness.

Quickly he realized that he was not falling of his own accord. He was being drug down into oblivion. He could feel something – a hand, a claw – around his ankle and he kicked at it. He kept falling headlong.

With a sickening snap – like the sound of fruit being torn from the vine, like the breaking of bone – he came into existence again. His stomach lurched and had this not been a dream he would have been sick.

He found himself in a half-finished room. Its edges were blurred, as if its architect had wandered off mid-draft. Its features were mere mottled grey suggestion. The room seemed uncertain of its own dimension, and it was at once impossibly small and improbably vast. The ceiling stretched to an oppressively cavernous height. At the far end of the room there lay a shadow.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he realized that the shadow was a figure and moreover that he knew it. He’d know it, him anywhere.

He took a step forward but the air was choked with feeling and he could not go further. Violently he felt the waves of rage-grief-fear-horror-pain-sick-lust roiling off the figure. He wanted, more than ever before, to hold the other in his arms. He felt that the other had been bitten by something with poisoned teeth and he wanted to press his lips to the hole and suck out the sickness. He wanted to press his lips to every wound and root out the darkness with his tongue and spit it through his teeth and lick the other clean. He hurt: all that rage and grief and fear, all that sick horror lust, all that need, it scalded. But he could not cross the room. He sank to his knees. He felt his cheek and knew that it was only dry because this was a dream.

The other did not speak but neither did he. Nothing needed to be said; they each knew all. He had the sense – he knew without knowing how – that he had been brought here to see this – to taste what festered beneath the surface – the truth having been shrouded in their waking life. He took a shaky breath and thought that he might be able to stand.

Suddenly the floor gave way and he fell into the nothingness again. The descent was quick and it was over before he could register its oncoming. He erupted into existence again with a thunderclap.

He knew that by all rights he should have died instantaneously from the cold oxygenless air. Because it was a dream he could breathe. He was on a mountain thick with snow, surrounded as far as the eye could see by other mountains thick with snow, in endless replication. The sky above was full of heavy clouds and so the world below reflected a dull bluish cast. He looked down and felt dizzy. It was as if the world had fallen out of existence and then again he supposed it had

Improbably but unsurprisingly, a black-branched tree sprouted from the side of the mountain. The only sign of life, such as it was. Its roots seemed untroubled by the thick crust of ice and its branches were free of the snow that covered all else.

At his feet he found a heavy shard of ice that came away easily in his hand. It was sharp as a scalpel and under it the trunk fell away like flesh. The opening gaped, a splintering slit. He scrabbled down the mountain a-ways, thinking vaguely of the soft white moths and wondering what materialize from the darkness.

 A tentative wing emerged from the trunk and then brushed the opening wider as if it were a curtain. From the shadows a beetle-eyed gorcrow came into view. It was massive, far larger than any bird he’d ever seen, and yet again the laws of nature seemed to bend for this apparition, distorted as light in a glass.

The gorcrow’s beak opened wide and it made a sound that he could not hear. It beat its wings experimentally before taking flight. At first it hurtled down towards the earth but it soon pulled out of its dive and swooped back over to the tree and the mountain and him. It hovered uncommonly like a hummingbird just above his nose and deliberately extended its talonned foot, a clear invitation. He grabbed hold of the bird and they were off.

Of course the gorcrow should not have been able to hold his weight and of course it did. This was a dream. They flew for what might have been days and the mountains stretched on. He did not think he had ever seen anything as flatly black as the bird’s feathers.

They flew steadily upward and eventually he realized that they were in fact leaving the earth altogether. Higher and higher they rose until the gorcrow was surrounded by the rival darkness of the universe, broken only by the dying light of the stars. He could barely see the gorcrow’s feathers against the dimensionless night. Still he held onto its talons and he did not tire. Still they ascended, defying all presumption of gravity.

The perpetual black of space was a welcome relief after the blinding blue haze of the mountain world. He felt that he could breathe easy again. The immensity of the universe did not trouble him. He thought only of flight. He had forgotten the black-branched trees; he has forgotten the crumpled figure in the unfinished too; he had forgotten what it felt like to fall; he had forgotten that he dreamed.

And then, suddenly and with no warning and for no discernible reason, he let go. He felt an immense sense of loss. The nothingness swallowed him whole and he went with eyes wide open. The bird flew on without him. He fell.

 

When he had finished falling he landed in a desert. Sand curved out forever and the air was still but there were traces of the wind on the land. At the far edge of the horizon he could see a blurred shape. If this were a dream, could it be a mirage? He walked in its direction for an unknowable stretch of time and then he arrived at the foot of another black-branched tree.

There was no hatchet here either but instead he found a sharp rock half-buried in the sand. He brushed it clean and held it in his two hands. He drove the sharp point into the tree’s trunk with purpose. Again and again and again he stabbed the tree. Blackened wood splintered off and cut his hands a thousand times. There was no blood although there should have been. He did not tire this time either.

Eventually enough of the trunk had been dug out so as to reveal another depthless black opening. He waited for a moment expectantly but nothing happened. He waited for another moment still. Nothing happened. He drove his hand into the gash and felt around the tree’s insides.

Immediately he found it. It was cold and dry and it did not turn to dust at his touch; it was real, real as a dream might be. He grabbed it and pulled. It came loose. He withdrew his hand from the tree and there it was: a great gleaming snake.

Its scales were a brilliant green. The color was so saturated it seemed artificial in this place of faded hues, and yet it was also the realest thing he had seen in the desert. He held the snake without fear and looked into its bright black eyes, another endless dark. The snake opened its mouth and he expected to see its forked tongue but instead a river poured out from its gullet and washed the world away.

He closed his eyes as the tide pulled him under.

 

When Gansey first woke that morning, he reached out for something and came up with air. He soon drifted off again. His fingers dangled over the lip of the bed, outstretched and grasping, even in sleep.

 

### II.

Ronan woke from his own clouded sleep. He had briefly, blessedly forgot that there was a ravenous poison tree in his living room. In that moment of fleeting respite he rolled over and into a foreign body.

“What,” he said faintly.

Then the memory bloomed like a bruise: dark and aching and beneath the surface bloodied. He could not help but prod at it.

He barely recalled dragging Gansey up the stairs, away from the tree, into his bed. But he supposed he had. He supposed it had all happened, then, and there was little reason to doubt it. Stranger things, stranger things.

He stumbled out of bed graceless.

The whole of the night previous unfurled fitfully. He was drawn inexorably downstairs and some small part of him still hoped that there would be no trees in his house. But there they were, terrible and unnatural as ever. The fullness of his horror and guilt returned. He sank to his knees and said the old words in the old tongue.

 

There Gansey found him leaning against the trunk of the Adam-vine, his lips chapped and his tongue dry.

“Well,” Gansey said steadily. Ronan knew he was putting on an act because he knew Gansey better than himself. For this same reason he let him get away with the deceit.

Gansey paused to look at the knotted branches that had grown around the three. He shook his head determinedly and in this moment (as in all moments) Ronan loved him bitterly. Gansey glowed with that self-assurance which had followed him all over the globe. The boy wunderkind. He was so good it hurt Ronan to look at him, a sharp settled pain in his teeth and his other living bones. Feeling rushed over Ronan in an unstoppable wave, and he could not speak.

But this was just fine, because Gansey spoke for him. “Well,” he said again. “How are we going to get them back?”

The question was its own answer, and so Ronan got to his feet.

 

“You dreamt it,” Gansey said matter-of-factly.

“Yeah,” Ronan said.

“But why,” Gansey asked.

The kettle rattled. They had retreated to the kitchen and Gansey had found a few tomatoes, some bread and a wedge of cheese. He settled easily into the practicality of breakfast, putting water on to boil for coffee and slicing up the tomatoes and cheese. Strange glittering coffee beans were ground up and their rich aroma filled the room. Ronan pieced together an intricate apparatus of glass and gleaming metal, undoubtedly a relic of his father’s own dreaming. He added the grounds to one chamber and when the kettle whistled, he poured hot water into another. The contraption hovered above the counter and began to vibrate.

“I don’t know,” Ronan said finally.

“That’s not good enough,” Gansey replied.

“Well, it’s what I’ve got.”

“You must have had a reason.”

“It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes I just don’t remember. I can’t always control it. You know that.”

“I know that you can control it when you want to, and when it’s convenient, you can’t.”

“That’s not – “

“What,” Gansey said coldly. Now that he had started, he could not stop. “After all, this isn’t the first time you’ve dreamt up something dangerous.”

Ronan said nothing and Gansey vengefully continued.

“I think you hide behind your dreams because you’re terrified to admit that they’re really you. The real you. All those monsters that kept – that kept trying to kill you, the one that nearly did, when Noah found you. You said it wasn’t like what we thought it was, but I think – “

“Shut up,” Ronan said, wild. “It wasn’t. You don’t know what you’re talking about, shut up, shut up – “

“I think it was exactly what we thought it was. It was you, you just couldn’t bear to do it yourself. And this is you too. They’re your dreams, Ronan! That thing – that tree – it came out of your head and it took our friends and you sat there and said _I think I killed them,_ but now you don’t know? Now you don’t remember?”

Gansey dropped the knife with a clatter. The glass contraption began emitting a deafening keen but neither of them paid it any mind; it faded petulantly. Ronan stared at Gansey and Gansey stared right back. The tense silence stretched and then snapped.

“You, you have to fix this,” Gansey said stubbornly and a little brokenly. He suddenly seemed very young.

Ronan could see the end of that sentence, written plainly across Gansey’s face. You have to fix this, because I just found them. I barely survived. I just kissed her for the first time. He just died for me, again. I was finally ready to leave this town behind.

This was somehow worse than Gansey’s rage – this naked grief, horrible and familiar – and Ronan could not bear it. He could not breathe next to Gansey and his broken bleeding beating heart.

So he left.

 

Gansey went looking for Ronan. It seemed to him that he had spent most his life searching for lost treasure and this was no exception.

Labyrinthine Ronan was in some respects the perfect quarry for Gansey, relic-hunter. When they first met, Gansey had wondered if Ronan was in fact purpose-made for him. A legend come to life, a myth made boy. The golden mother, who never left their otherworldly home. The father, a folktale charmer with an accent so thick, his smirk lilted. Three sons, just like any good fairytale. All those portents in the night sky.

At some point, of course, Ronan became something more than a curiosity – a friend, a brother, a fellow explorer, the one fixed point, who made the quest for Glendower all the more real by making it his own. And yet Gansey remained curious; he could not help himself. But there was no real answer to the question of Ronan.

The problem had always been that he could not follow Ronan into a dream. Even before he had first heard the word _Greywaren_ , he had felt Ronan’s strangeness and he had loved and feared it in equal measure. Ronan, an unanswerable question. Ronan, a maze with no solution.

And if Ronan was a labyrinth, did that leave Gansey to play the part of Theseus, carefully unspooling Ariadne’s bright red thread? Daedalus himself had told the secret of the maze to Ariadne, and in turn she had told it to Theseus. Do not turn. Go forward and ever down. Do not turn.

So Theseus went into darkness, so Gansey went into darkness. Could he go without question – without doubt – without turning from the path? And what would he find at the heart of the labyrinth, its center and end – what monster did Ronan contain? Theseus had met the minotaur, and struck the dumb beast dead. When Gansey’s thread ran out, when he solved the maze’s riddle, when he met the monster within – could he bring himself to slay it, or would he lie down with it?

Gansey shook these tangled thoughts from his head and pulled a mint leaf from his pocket.

He walked toward the sun and eventually found Ronan sprawled out on a massive slab of marble that was, despite the July heat, cool to the touch. He clambered up the stone and sat next to Ronan.

“Found you,” he said.

“Lucky,” Ronan replied. He did not open his eyes.

Gansey imagined he ought to apologize for the morning. “I had a dream last night.”

Ronan emitted some indifferent noise.

“I saw these trees,” Gansey continued. “Like the one in the house. There were three of them. Bigger.”

Although Ronan’s eyes remained stubbornly closed, Gansey could feel his attention sharpening.

“I kept having to – to cut them open. The first time I had a little hatchet and I was in a forest. The second time it was a mountain somewhere very cold and I had a hard piece of ice that didn’t melt. The last time I was in a desert and I had a rock. Every time I cut it open something came out of the tree – moths, the first time – and then I would sort of…fall, I suppose, somewhere else.”

“You and your dreams are boring me, Dick,” Ronan said. Gansey ignored him.

“Except the first time it wasn’t really like falling. It was like something was dragging me down. I landed in this – it was a room, I guess. It was grey. And I wasn’t alone. There was something else – someone, really – and I thought it was…but I couldn’t be sure…”

Gansey trailed off. For a while there was silence.

Ronan open his eyes slowly and tilted his face toward Gansey. He arranged his teeth in a feral little smile.

“No such thing as a good night's sleep here," he said. “You should know that by now.”

With that he closed his eyes again. Gansey left him to it.

 

 

Ronan laid out on the marble until the last streaks of the sun were long gone and then he trudged up the hill to the house. The implacable moon hung overhead. He let himself into the house and because it was dark it was easy to pretend that there were no trees in his living room. He felt faintly hungry but relished the ache as a reminder of passing time. He crept up the stairs to his room.

There slept Gansey. The bedsheet with its faded red stripes had been kicked to the floor. Gansey had folded himself up like an unblossomed flower, wrapped tightly against the world. There were any number of empty bedrooms at the Barns but there he was. In the privacy of darkness Ronan could admit he was glad for it. He peeled off his thin grey shirt and his dark jeans before laying down next to Gansey, pulling the sheet back over them both.

He hesitated to close his eyes. He had not been lying when he told Gansey that he did not always remember his dreams. Sometimes he woke up to strange unremembered creatures or with an unexplained bitterness on his tongue, like blood. Sometimes he went days without remembering a dream. He worried over these nights like an amnesiac.

But he was also shamefully somewhat relieved to forget. He got so little rest. He envied the sleepers’ easy consciouslessness – how easily they banished the cobwebs of their half-recollected dreams, how unburdened they were after a night’s rest. As fearful as he was of losing control over the dreams, he was grateful for those forgotten nights. It was the closest he got to oblivion.

He listened to Gansey breathe in the soft quiet dark.

There had been something familiar about Gansey’s dream, although he hadn’t wanted to admit it. The grey room – the desert. He felt as if he had been there. Like he might have dreamed it, too.

He stared up at the ceiling.

He missed Monmouth. He had not spoken to Gansey for three full days after he learned that he’d sold the building. All for a pointless piece of paper. Just so Gansey could say, We did this together, too.

At Monmouth when he couldn’t sleep he would go find Gansey and he’d be awake, too. They would climb onto the roof and throw rocks across the parking lot or take the Pig out for a spin. The grocery store was open late and they’d wander its empty aisles, bathed in yellow-green light. Sometimes Gansey could be convinced to split a bottle of cheap whiskey with him and they’d both stretch out across Gansey’s bed, their feet scraping along the floor. They would whisper about dead Welsh kings and other such things until Gansey drifted off. And then Ronan would go back to his room, except sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he stayed and watched the sun rise on Gansey’s skin.

Of course, those were the good nights. Because sometimes, Gansey would catch Ronan stumbling into Monmouth before dawn with vodka on his breath and cologne sticky sweet on his skin. Some nights Ronan would catch Gansey cradling the telephone, his cheek pressed to the receiver, smiling. Some nights they lay apart in their separate shared hells.

Some nights Ronan couldn’t stay awake at all.

But all that was over now and Ronan was awake and alone because Gansey went and got himself killed and now he slept just fine.

 

He closed his eyes and let the dream pull him under.

The city unfolded before him. Colorless streets blinked into existence, speckled with colorless houses and colorless cars. There were no leaves on the trees which lined the lanes. The city was empty of people and to the east there was a bottomless hole.

He knew it to be eastward because the sun rose ascendant over its dark earthen maw. He turned his back on the lonely city and walked toward the sun.

The grey crumbling dirt was striated with dull red clay. At its heart was an impenetrable darkness. In school he had learned that there was a molten core at the center of the earth and that it was unimaginably hot and that this heat burned eternally. This rudimentary science had replaced the reigning playground wisdom which suggested you could dig a hole to China, where everyone walked upside down. In adulthood he had learned that there was no such thing as the other side of the world, distance being relative.

He stepped up to its lip and cast his eye downward (ever down). Suddenly he became more conscious of the scene’s unreality – the ghost town behind him perfectly featureless, the impossible chasm at his right, the thick silence – and he exhaled. It was a dream.

He arched his back and jumped.

Headlong he fell, picking up exponential speed. The wind rushed silently by. The passage through the earth grew narrower and narrower, until it was just barely wide enough. Even though it was a dream his eyes stung. He dropped into the earth’s miasmatic crust with the sonic force of an angel’s expulsion from heaven – he took leave of his body – he became air. He became gravity. He became the arc of the fall.

So he landed. With a lurching obscene _pop_ he became a body again. For a moment it made him sick.

Then he looked around the room.

A broken building towered around him. Above, an arching window with slivered piano-key panes let in some murky twilight. At the center of the window a clock had stopped at half past twelve. The wooden floor was jagged and revealed the building’s decaying foundations. It was detritus-strewn: collapsing Victorian sofas and once straight-backed chairs now hobbled by time, shattered glass from curio cabinets and decapitated porcelain figurines. Spines of sharp crystal scattered to the four winds. And everywhere, dead geodesic flower blossoms, black and glittering like so many dissembled funereal wreaths. He bent to pick up a bloom and it erupted into opaque-dust.

Half of the western wall had been blown away and through it he saw the last of the sun. In the purpling light he could just barely make out a world beyond the windows.

The room cast its own shadows, which shifted in the stillness. The air was heavy. Below the arching window was a caved-in fireplace of cracked black marble. As his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he began to pick out the room’s most curious feature. Words had been painted in thick white paint all along the walls – the looming bookcases – the curving mirror with its soot-gilt frame – along the fireplace’s split mantel – and even on the cathedral roof above. Every surface crowded with the painted words, the largest of which wailed -

_LEAVE: ITS TIME_

_STAY: HURRY UP PLEASE_

\- over and over. Smaller fragments of text sprawled vein-like on the corpse of the room, a strange poetry.

He could not speak in the dream – or if he made sound, he could not hear it – but in his mind he read: _In the place where we were made…in the bower with its shade…in the lonely garden…we were undone…_

The lyrics were frenzied and aching and they swam before his eyes. _At the death of the world…you laid your body out to burn…and begged me to light the flame…And when I struck the match…you cried for water…_

As he read, the ghostly words began to disintegrate into an ash that slid from the walls like sand in an hourglass. He read and read until the entire floor was covered in that fine silt, each word crumbling as the message – one of fearsome longing at the end of days – burned itself before his eyes. He read the words in no particular order, although they insisted upon some strange rhythm.

_We were in the living place…the quiet green surrounds…we lie together and we drown…_

The ash clung to his ankles.

_I looked for you when you were lost…you would not be found…_

He coughed into the thickening air.

_Every clock in the world struck the time…on the day you and I…_

It reached his knees.

_Before you even the angels were made profane…what chance had I…_

He was waist-deep in it now and sinking fast but he could not stop.

_In the glade you held me…in the ice you held me…in the desert you held me...And only in the eternal overhead did you know me…_

He choked, his ribs caving in.

_I warned you but it was not enough…_

Dead words filled his mouth. Soon he would not see.

_You asked for the world…But it was not enough…it was never enough…_

He sank.

 

 

### III.

Gansey woke in the morning and gasped for air.

As the panic waned he felt some kind of elated shame, as if he had witnessed an intimacy forbidden to him and gotten away with the violation. As if he had pressed his eye to the keyhole of the universe and seen the inner workings of its lock. His stomach twisted and he realized with a more earthly embarrassment that he was hard, wanting.

Ronan lay next to him, breathing his shallow little breaths, his sleep undisturbed.

Once on a dare – from Ronan, who else – Gansey had grabbed hold of an electrified post in a cattle fence on the outskirts of town and his skin felt now as then: hot shocked and delirious. He shivered and lay his eyes on Ronan, whose spine curved gently like the horizon line.

Emboldened by the lingering dream-haze, Gansey slid his hand under the thin sheet, under the band of his shorts. The sun had not yet fully risen. Although he knew he was awake – he could hear the waking birds, nothing turned to dust – it did not entirely feel real. He took his cock in hand and stroked the head in a slow, torturous motion. Tension shot through him even from that simple touch. He glanced hastily back at Ronan’s turned back and felt again that elated shame, that electric guilt. He tugged at himself again.

The black shards of Ronan’s tattoo rippled with the rise and fall of his ribs. He slept shirtless, the sheet wrapped around his waist and his shorn head tucked tenderly to his chest. He continued to breathe evenly and Gansey felt again the reckless rush.

He closed his eyes and began to move his hand in a familiar rhythm. He knew that this was foolish – and moreover that it was wrong, to touch himself with Ronan lying right there – but pleasure propelled him. His breath quickened and he bit his lip.

His cock was heavy and a little dry and so he stopped to lick the length of his hand. He shuddered a little at the sensation – his spit cooling quickly in the unmoved air, his cock blood-rushed – and renewed his grip. He pushed his hips down into the mattress, trying to keep from thrusting up into his own hand. He went on for a moment or two and of course it felt like an ecstatic eternity. The skin on his forearms began to prickle, a sure sign of coming release. He let out a shaky breath and screwed his eyes shut even tighter.

Ronan twitched in his sleep and Gansey froze. His eyelids jumped open and his traitorous cock leapt in his hand as he glanced again at Ronan. He seemed still settled in sleep.

The desire, hot in the pit of his gut, staggered. Horribly he was even more turned on now – Ronan lying next to him, that ravenous spine, the piercing hollow of his ribs, the suggestion of his hips. Struck, Gansey began to move again, his hand heavy on his cock and his eyes fixed on Ronan’s thorned shoulder.

He bit down again on his lip to keep from panting out his bloodlust. He could no longer keep from twisting up into his hand; his fear at being found out melted into something that simmered and he thought only of feeling. Feeling good. Feeling electric.

Suddenly it crashed over him and he pulsed into his hand. His come slipped between his fingers and soaked the fabric of his shorts. He breathed hard and low, dazed.

Almost immediately, the shame – which had so recently been a hot, twisting thing – froze. The warmth in his skin drained away with the blood and he felt sick at his lust. Next to him, Ronan lay still in a deep sleep, and the guilt uncurled serpentine in his gut. Whatever he had briefly seen in or projected on Ronan had gone away, leaving a slimy condensation of sweat and semen and shame in its wake.

He gingerly slipped out of bed. His legs were sticky but mercifully the bed seemed dry to his touch. The air smelled tangy. He grabbed a towel off the floor and headed into the hall, leaving the door ajar.

In the shower, he cleaned himself warily. His now soft cock was raw to the touch. He dragged a washcloth over himself and shivered at the roughness, a pain some small part of him felt he deserved.

 

In the bedroom, Ronan exhaled.

 

That morning they moved as if they were unfamiliar to each other, each wrapped up in their own respective shames.

Gansey rattled around the kitchen, opening drawers and pulling out indecipherable dream-things along with the odd kitchen utensil. He settled on cereal with milk from one of Niall’s cows. The liquid glimmered faintly. Ronan fixed coffee again, his brow clouded and his hands clumsy. They spoke short sharp fragments at each other.

The atmosphere churned with all these little desecrations. The unacknowledged presence of the trees in the room next over was a wound that had clotted. Silence hung conspiratorial and they were each complicit.

Ronan took his coffee out to the back of the house. He perched on the generator, which hummed a familiar tune from an ‘80s sitcom his father had once liked. He surveyed the land – his land now – like an architect, imagining idly how he might shape this or that. He had no intention to leave this place. The air here was clean. Time hung loosely around his neck. He could breathe.

Except of course the peace of this place had been poisoned by the dreaming tree, and now he felt choked at every turn.

The sun-licked fields began to resemble so much scorched earth.

His thoughts raced. He had dreamed up this thing that had taken the people most important to him and Gansey alike (save each other) and it had been two whole days and he had done nothing. They might be dead in their thorny caskets. They might be lost in a howling nightmare. They might be stranded on some blighted plane.

Not for the first time he felt that he was the source of all their pain and that they might be better off without him. If he had not been there to dream Cabeswater, how would the story unfold? He had encouraged Gansey’s quest for his own selfish reasons: he had drawn comfort from their shared descent into the unnatural (I am not alone) and had desperately wanted Gansey, ever wanderer, to stay in Henrietta (Do not leave me alone). Would Gansey have remained in this otherwise unremarkable town long enough to die, without the thrill of the hunt for Glendower?

Ronan drug everything he touched into his own otherworldly perdition. He felt tied to this land in a way he could not explain. It was not just about his being the Greywaren; it was not just about his being his father’s son.

Once in a dream he had unhinged his jaw and gobbled up all the light in the known universe until there was nothing but pure unending darkness, no stars no sun no moon, just an incessant yowl of impenetrable blackness, and at this horror he had felt a perverse joy for this pathetic fallacy of a world.  At his core there had always been an unyielding hunger. The tree had swallowed the others whole – he had watched it happen, those ravenous branches – and he had dreamed the tree – had he brought this all down upon their heads? There was a certain tang to the air, an inevitable rust.  Was this but further evidence of his own profane nature?

In the distance, church bells began to ring, the bronze fruit of one of his father’s trees.

 

Inside the house, Gansey noisily cleared up the debris of his breakfast. He sighed bodily.

He got the kitchen so clean it gleamed back at him in knowing recrimination; he could not put it off any longer. He was not even aware that he had been putting it off, but of course, he had been. Time flowed strangely at the Barns. It was hard to feel hurried here. He had been inhabiting a state of persistent perpetual dread about the state of the trees in the living room, but it had lacked urgency. In a far-off corner of his mind, he wondered if that was an effect of the trees, or indicative of a more personal moral failing.

He walked into the darkened living room; he had drawn the shades the day prior. Now he threw the curtains wide and let the light stream in. It seemed to him – although it was hard to say – that the three trees had grown. They had certainly sprouted new branches in the night.

He sat on the floor next to the Henry-vine and placed his palms cautiously on the trunk. He remembered vividly the image of yesterday morning – Ronan, leaning against the Adam-vine, the posture of a penitent.

It often seemed that Ronan’s faith was borne not out of some transcendent belief in a higher power but rather fueled by a dark fear that simmered just under his skin. Ronan prayed not for absolution – for he so clearly saw himself as beyond saving, Gansey had known this for years now – but to forestall the inevitable day of judgment. Ronan prayed for time.

Time, which stretched out immemorial in this place.

The not-leaves rustled faintly in the air, and Gansey was momentarily surprised to hear them. He had been, for some unfathomable reason, expecting silence.

 

Ronan and Gansey found each other that afternoon in a field of long orange grass. Each was unsurprised to see the other, although neither was entirely sure how they had arrived at the scene.

The haziness which hung over the Barns had been burned off a little by the high summer sun and Gansey felt clear-headed for the first time in days. He had banished the memory of the morning’s transgression to the far corner of his mind; there was work to be done. Compartmentalization was a Gansey family trait.

“Something strange is going on here,” he began.

“No shit,” Ronan replied.

Gansey ignored him. “It’s like we’re under some kind of spell.”

“Does this look like Hogwarts to you?”

“Can you just take things seriously, for once,” Gansey said. “Our friends are in trouble.”

“I know,” Ronan said sharply.

“Then act like it. Look, I’m trying to say that – that everything feels cloudy here. Not real. Time’s passing strangely and I can’t think straight. The only thing that’s felt truly real has been these…these dreams I’m having.”

Ronan went still, a deer in the headlights.

“And look,” Gansey pressed on, determined to get it all out at once, while he could. “I feel like – I have this weird feeling, like they’re real, like they really mean something.”

That wasn’t quite what he thought, but he let it hang.

“I haven’t remembered my dreams,” Ronan said quickly. “Not for the last two nights.”

“You keep saying that, but – I think you do. Enough to at least think there might be something to what I’m saying. Because you feel it too, don’t you?”

“Maybe,” Ronan said.

“Come on.”

“Fine. All right. Yes.”

“And haven’t you wondered why I didn’t eat the apple, like the others? Because I think – “

Ronan shook his head fiercely. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“We have to talk about it! Every detail could be important. It could be the key.”

“Well fuck. Maybe I just don’t want to remember you screaming your head off,” Ronan said in a rush, his voice rising.

Gansey looked slightly mollified. He cleared his throat. “I don’t – I don’t exactly remember what happened, after they took the apples. I seemed to have blacked out.”

“Then what’s the point of talking about it.”

Ronan’s mulishness reinvigorated Gansey. He wanted to get the truth out and say the unspoken things before the light faded and the haze retook them. “Because I have a theory as to how I survived.”

Ronan bristled at the verb but said nothing.

“I think,” Gansey said, straining to keep his voice level, “that there was a part of me that remembered the tree. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say - that the tree remembered me.”

“What do you mean? I’m the one who dreamed it, apparently – it’s my fault, remember,” Ronan snapped. Gansey did not take the bait.

“Yes, yes, I know. But think about it: you and I were the only ones who resisted. I almost, at first – but I remember this, it was like…Like slowly waking up from a dream. At first it’s your mind and your body has to catch up. Don’t you think it matters, that we didn’t – that we’re still – “

“Where are you going with this, Gansey?” Ronan said slowly.

“It’s like it didn’t want us – like it wasn’t for us.”

“I didn’t even have an apple.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re not making sense.”

Gansey took a breath. He exhaled and said the things he didn’t want to say. “When I – when I died, and came back, it felt like…like I was being knit out of all these different pieces of borrowed yarn. I wasn’t entirely my own person. Like I was only alive because I’d taken part of all of you – from Noah, obviously, but from you and Blue and Adam, and Henry, too.”

Gansey had known this almost immediately on waking, but he’d kept it to himself. How exactly to say, I think I’ve been resurrected? He felt all jangled up inside, like he had been reconstituted from an assemblage of alien organs and his own innate Ganseyness was struggling to accept the new status quo. In the days immediately following his death he had felt closer than ever to the others. He could feel them in a way he had never before. At times, it threatened to overwhelm. But mostly it was a comfort, to know that he would never be alone again.

Standing in the light of the goldenrod field, he knew that his recent dreams were not solely his. This knowledge was accompanied by a sort of blinding terror because the dreams had been sublime in the truest sense of the word; they had brought a pleasurable sort of terror to his nights. Ronan’s dreams – and it had to be said, they were undoubtedly his, at least in origin – were thick with riotous emotion.

Gansey had trailed off, consumed by these thoughts and the remnant memory of the dreams. He cleared his throat again and looked up at Ronan, who said nothing.

“Don’t you see?” Gansey said. “I think I’ve been dreaming your dreams. Or we’re having the same dream. I don’t know. But I feel like I’ve been inside your head.”

Ronan looked as if he’d been struck in the gut. He took a step back, and Gansey moved toward him; Ronan warded him off with outstretched hands.

“No,” he said. “No."

“Yes,” Gansey said firmly. “And I think we can use it. This is it, Ronan! The first night, with the trees, I just _knew_ to cut them open. It’s like your – or our, rather – subconscious was telling us what to do. Now that we understand, now that we know to listen, maybe we could – “

“No!” Ronan said madly. He took another step away from Gansey and nearly tripped, his legs tangled in the long reedy grass.

“Ronan! Don’t you see, this is it, this is our chance to fix this, bring them back!”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!” Ronan shouted back. “You’re – you have no fucking right to - "

Gansey made as if to reply but Ronan kept shouting, his eyes bright. He had started to half-run from Gansey. “You can’t – no right – stay the fuck out of my head, Gansey." 

“I don’t think it works like that,” Gansey said as he caught up to Ronan. The sun had gone red at its edges and a certain kind of bloodlust roiled up in him. He reached out to grab at Ronan. He wanted to hold him still or perhaps pin him to the ground.

Ronan spun on the spot, snarling like a cornered animal, and pushed him hard. Gansey stumbled.

“You can’t run away from this,” Gansey said angrily. “Not like you always do.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan spat. He pushed Gansey again, even harder.

Gansey raised his arms in mock surrender but this only seemed to enrage Ronan further. Ronan took a step forward and shoved him a third time. Gansey met his eye and then something overcame him entirely.

He surged forward and knocked Ronan to the ground. He was both shorter and slighter than Ronan, and the advantage of surprise was quickly spent. He caught a fleeting glint of approval in Ronan’s eye, like he hadn’t expected Gansey to fight back. But soon whatever was there went dull and Ronan threw Gansey roughly to the side in a practiced move. Stalks of grass splintered as they thrashed on the earth. Gansey kicked fiercely at Ronan – Ronan forced his face into the dirt.

They grappled with each other like this for a few hard-breathing minutes. Ronan split Gansey’s lip and Gansey drove his fist into Ronan’s eye. It bloodied on impact.

Gansey’s leg connected with Ronan’s ribs and he groaned like a felled tree. The gruesome sound startled Gansey into stillness, and for a split-second it seemed they might give it up, but soon Ronan was back on him. His hands clawed at Gansey’s shirt, driving him into the dirt again and again. Gansey twisted underneath him and they rolled – Gansey fixed Ronan to the ground and straddled him, an elbow to the throat. Ronan went still as Gansey pressed down experimentally against his windpipe. For a wild moment it seemed like Gansey might end it all there, and like Ronan might let him.

But then Ronan took Gansey’s wrist in hand and flipped him onto his back. He pinned both of Gansey’s wrists into the dirt with his knees and stared down at him. Blood dripped over the bridge of his nose, splattering Gansey’s pale green collar.

“I hate you,” Ronan said. “And I can’t stop.”

He let Gansey go and walked away, toward the setting sun.

 

Gansey lay stunned in the field for some time. It grew dark. He could see lights flickering on in the house, and despite himself he was glad for the sign of life. Time went on, marked by the smallest of trivialities, even in this place.

He stood and felt his bruises stretch. His lip hurt and one of his front teeth seemed a little loose. He probed at it with his tongue and then licked at the scab. Dirt itched in his open scrapes and his head throbbed dully. They had not fought like this before.

Ronan had said the thing they were not supposed to say: _I hate you._ Of course, Gansey had seen it in his eyes before – that desperate, pleading rage – and he’d even felt it himself. How could they not. There is little distance between love and hate. He loved Ronan, and the love made him afraid, and he hated to be afraid, so he hated the thing that made him fear. He hated Ronan because he might leave and he hated Ronan because he could not. 

Of course, he loved him for the same reasons.

Gansey wondered, and not for the first time, if he and Declan might have this extremity in common. It was impossible to avoid this thought, with Ronan’s blood on his knuckles; how often had he seen the Lynch brothers claw at each other in similar fashion. All that love, all that hate.

He began to trudge back toward the house. They had never fought like this before, but they had each wanted it from time to time, and now they had finally done it. It was like expelling a ghost or other such haunting. He supposed he ought to feel guilt or regret but mostly there was just relief.

They had each said (some of) the things they were not supposed to say, and now they could get on with it. The fight had swept away the last of the cobwebs from his mind. Of course, there was still the memory of that very morning, but he did his best to push it aside. He had the beginnings of a plan. They were going to get the others back. Then he and Blue and Henry would go off to the West and Adam and Ronan would fold up further in each other and everything would be as it was. As it should be.

Of course, he would need Ronan for all of this to work. Dreams were, after all, his domain.

**  
**

### IV.

He limped up the hill. He and Gansey had sparred before – playfighting, mostly – but it’d never been like that. He felt a familiar shame at having lost control, again, always.

At the crest of the knoll, he was seized by a sudden urge to turn around and lay eyes on Gansey. He fixed his gaze on the house ahead and thought grimly, _Non te nullius exercent numinis irae_. He walked on and did not look back. He held himself rigid until he got up the hill and let himself in through the back door.

A roar had built up in his throat, desperate and punishing, and he let it go. He could hold himself in no longer. All his sinew went to jelly. He felt his lips tear around the sound and his eyes stung. Everything stung. He was bruised and battered and bloody. His tongue was heavy with copper.

In the house Ronan disintegrated. In the house Ronan howled.

At the start of the summer, the others had seemed certain that the perilous days were behind them. Their heads were full with dreams for the future; they sounded like normal teenagers, plotting their adventures. College for Adam, the open road for the rest of them.

He made it halfway up the stairs.

Ronan had known better. He knew what he was good for: dark night dreams and magic things. He would stay at the Barns, on the outskirts of Henrietta, in this place where the rules of the world did not apply. Whenever he tried to imagine leaving, all he felt was a choking kind of fear. He had only just returned.

And he had spent years playing Sisyphus with his dreams, sewing up wounds of his own making to atone for sins committed in his sleep, where horizonless horrors bloomed against the screen of his eyelids, monstrous vistas and daydream devastations, crumbling monuments to the apocalypse which turned to dust in his hands, everything turned to bitter dust in his hands. Everything turned to hard flint in his mouth. Everything turned to tinder in his mind. Occasionally he had managed to pull something good out of his dreams – a gift, Matthew – but mostly he dreamed up deadly things.

For his father the dreams had been an inexhaustible well. For Ronan they were a horror-tide. They threatened to engulf at any moment.

See, at some point or another he had learned that it was possible for the body to drown itself. To drown in itself. He was struck deeply by this, by these unseen autonomous calculations, by the body’s infinite capacity for betrayal. The body is a finely calibrated thing and yet. It goes awry. Call it God’s great design. Call it what you like. But the body was not built for his kind of mind.

Even in his waking hours he feels the dreams, seething like a storm-struck sea. He imagines his body as a bottle or a barricade, holding back the tide. But the waves, being waves, are relentless and he can feel himself eroded. More and more it seems that he cannot contain it all. He runs his hands along his skin, seeking out imperfection. Any gap or fissue is suspect. Any small act or failure to act might be his undoing. So he day-dreams of poreless skin. He day-dreams of a wired-shut jaw. He wishes to be inviolate, to hold all that races in his blood beneath iron-clad skin, to stitch up his mouth and to place heavy coins on his eyes, to black out the light and to stop up the sound. All those infinite fractures and splits, sanded down smooth. He wishes to be a fortress. But instead he is constantly worrying new sores in his skin. Instead he is cleaving up his veins, letting the words and the blood and the devil-dreams out. He cannot help himself.

So he dreams of concrete. He dreams of seamless cells. Jewelboxes without keys, cages without doors. Anything to contain it. Because if he opens his mouth, his eyes, his body, those wildsaw monsters will stream out triumphant and cover the earth. Surely he contains enough darkness to blot out the sun. Surely he contains enough hunger to eat up the world. So he must contain it - hold it - his breath - the stitch, a tear - and yet inevitably he reveals himself. A traitorous lesion.

Gansey knew nothing of this. The dreams, their deathsome wings. Gansey had seen him bleeding on the concrete and thought nothing of asking for this. Here was Gansey running towards the tidal wave. Gansey did not understand when to leave well enough alone. For the third time he would court death and this time it would be undeniably Ronan’s fault. Yet another line of red on his ledger. Yet another sin. 

(Lord have mercy. Christ hear us. Have mercy on us. Saint Peter to whom were given the keys of the kingdom of heaven…Saint Peter bound in chains for Christ. Saint Peter delivered from prison by an angel. Saint Peter who rejoiced to suffer for Christ…That we may die the death of the just…O glorious apostle who received the power of loosing and binding pray for us…)

Again, always, Ronan wondered if all their misfortune could be traced to him. Adam, Blue, and Henry were gone because of him. Kavinsky had burned for him. Gansey had died and it had taken Noah to bring him back and all for that timeless place he had dreamed. His father, dead-eyed on the concrete. His mother – his brother. Did all that hang around his neck, too?

And this morning. Yet another sin. Gansey’s hot breath on his skin. He’d felt it, woken by the rustling sheets and Gansey’s barely held breath. He had laid there and listened. He had felt – or at least imagined, which might be worse – Gansey’s eyes on him and he had wanted it. Had he pulled that lust out of Gansey like some sick unraveling? Had he brought all this down on their heads? Was this finally punishment for his many sins?

This feverish chorus of self-recrimination, a common refrain, rising higher, and higher. (Babylon is fallen, Babylon is fallen…)

Gansey kept insisting that they dissect every thought, every dream, every memory. It could be the key, he had said. The key. All his certainty. Did he not know that by thinking of the key, he built the lock?

Ronan slumped against the bannister, his eyes pressed shut, a bright sweat on his skin.

And if certain sins took the form of thought, what of dreams? Did he sin by sleeping? Ronan worshipped an all-seeing god. (Confiteor Deo omnipotenti…) So yes. Undoubtedly. And now Gansey walked in his dreams. Now Gansey saw his dreams. Saw the grey room and saw the other things, too. Saw the. Saw the. Fall. Saw it all. Did this make him omniscient – was it blasphemy to say – another sin, add it to the ledger, o prince of apostles – quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opera…If he had seen the dreams, he had seen it all, so he knew, now He knew.

Was this then his Leviathan? Two bodies lying at odds in a bed or a field. Two dreamers unspooling. Black-branched trees unfurling. An ultimate test of faith – the final –

That last thought burned up in a feverish haze and his vision blurred. If he could just rest, just for a moment, for a breath, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so…

 “Ronan?”

A voice came through the violet darkness and his eyelids flickered. Gansey’s gilt face swam before his unfocused eyes.

“Ronan?” the voice repeated. The voice was Gansey’s; his lips moved.

“Yes,” Ronan slurred back.

“Oh, shit,” Gansey said. There was something funny about his delivery and so Ronan laughed.

“Everything hurts,” Ronan said wondrously. He laughed again, a strange hiccupping sound.

“You look like you got run over by a truck,” Gansey said. His face blurred and Ronan shook his head a little.

“You’re not a truck.”

“Sharp. Maybe I didn’t knock all the brain cells out of you after all.”

Gansey took Ronan's wrist in his hand and tracked the pulse with two careful fingers.

The brume in Ronan’s head dissipated a little. “You’re not usually this funny.”

“It’s probably just the concussion talking,” Gansey said. “We should get you cleaned up and into bed. Or wait. You can’t fall asleep, of course. And maybe, actually – I’m being stupid. You need a doctor, obviously, we should go – “

“No hospitals,” Ronan said.

There was an uneasy silence. Gansey grimaced.

“Fine. I suppose you'll survive. I’ll keep an eye on you to be safe. But first we get clean, we’re both revolting. You more than most, of course.”

Gansey pulled Ronan to his feet. Ronan sagged against him, his arm heavy around Gansey’s neck. They moved slowly, as one.

 

Up the stairs, and into the jade-tiled bathroom. It was an impossibly wide room and fancifully outfitted. He brought Ronan up to the lip of the marble bathtub, which was sunk so deep into the floor, it appeared almost bottomless.

Gansey flicked the taps. One afternoon at the Barns, long ago and before Ronan’s exile, Gansey had once remarked on the tub’s uncanny resemblance to the prefects’ washroom at Hogwarts. Ronan blanched at this, but Matthew had just let out his boyish giggle and said, “Dad made it for us!” At the time, Gansey had assumed that Niall had paid some contractor to design his sons a bathroom fit for wizards; now, he realized that Niall (or perhaps even Ronan himself) had literally dreamt it up.

Ronan sat at the edge of the bathtub, keeling slightly to the right. He had pulled his shirt off, exposing a battery of scrapes and, of course, his ever-inked skin. The tattoo spilled down Ronan’s shoulder and ribs, looking at once like a winged raven with razor teeth and a thorny crucifixion.

“Do you want some privacy,” Gansey said after a while. Ronan had not gotten into the bathtub, nor had he removed any more clothing. Gansey felt slightly flushed with embarrassment; intimacy strained. He stopped the taps and a pool of pale purple steam hovered over the water.

Ronan said nothing.

“Do you, do you want help?” Gansey gestured toward Ronan’s jeans and heavy black boots.

Ronan shook his head finally and unraveled the boot laces, kicking them off. He stopped.

 “Can you,” Ronan said flatly.

Gansey understood the half-question in the way that he had always understood Ronan. “Okay,” he said easily. His hands shivered.

As he unbuttoned Ronan’s jeans, he thought vaguely that he had never done this before, never undressed another person before, let alone a boy, let alone a Ronan. He knelt at Ronan’s feet and as he pulled off the stiff denim, Ronan steadied himself with a hand on Gansey’s shoulder.

“I got it,” Ronan said. Gansey fixed his eyes on the dark green tile, and he could hear the soft rustle of Ronan’s boxers (which were unsurprisingly black) and the sharp splash of water as Ronan slipped into the bathtub. Gansey looked up. Ronan had submerged himself, only the top of his shaved head disturbing the glassy mirror of water.

He surfaced.

“I can just sit over there,” he said. “If you need something, you can just – “

“No,” Ronan said. “Soap?”

Gansey walked to the scrolled vanity with its twin sinks and found a fresh bar of soap, which seemed magical in its mundanity. He brought it back to Ronan, hand outstretched.

“Can you do my back.”

Gansey let out a breath he had unknowingly held. The surreality of this scene - an eternity ago, he had clawed this blood onto Ronan's back, and now he would wash it away - was not lost on him. And yet what could he do. He nodded and dipped his hands into the water at Ronan’s back. He rubbed the bar between his palms, drumming up a thick white lather. The angle of his wrist was awkward and uncomfortable, and he fleetingly thought that this would be much easier if he, too, were in the tub – but he banished that traitorous notion and laid his hands on Ronan’s spine.

Slowly, carefully, he washed his back. The bruises there surely mirrored his own, which ached as he stretched to reach Ronan’s far side. The dirt fell away from his skin and seemed to almost evaporate on the water.

Ronan murmured slightly and senselessly. Gansey tried to catch his eye, needing some small sign that this was allowed, as it did not seem like it should be, but Ronan’s eyes were fast shut. He kept on.

“Okay,” Gansey said into the silence, unsure how to signal that he had finished.

“Keep going,” Ronan said, and it seemed to be a challenge.

So Gansey did. Ronan leaned back and Gansey soaped up his hands again and cleaned his shoulders and his arms, moving around the tub slowly. Ronan sat on a hidden ledge in the tub, his head tilted back and much of his torso above the water. The surface of the water was perfectly opaque – some dream-trick, surely – and so Gansey could only see his own reflection as he worked. It felt like atonement, he imagined.

Gansey ran his lathered hands over Ronan’s chest. He cleaned the salted sweat off his skin and soon all that was exposed to the air glistened with a soapy sheen. Ronan slid back under the surface and the water carried away the soap’s film. He emerged and opened his eyes to look at Gansey, who had leaned away from the tub. His hands dripped onto the floor.

The tub was fathomless and the water a dark, deep shadow. And while Gansey could not see even an inch under its surface, he knew what lay underneath. Even the thought of it – of Ronan’s exposed skin, with all its little wounds, all the damage he had inflicted – burned him a little. He coughed slightly.

“Towel?” Ronan said, affectless.

“Sure,” Gansey agreed quickly, too quickly. He got up and found another mundane miracle, a clean white towel that was somehow slightly warm to the touch. He set it at the edge of the tub and then took a few steps away, his back to Ronan. He heard Ronan pull himself from the water and flick open the drain. The whorl of departing water echoed in the silence.

“I’m tired,” Ronan said at Gansey’s back. He seemed more himself, which is to say irritable.

“You should drink some water,” Gansey replied. He turned back to Ronan, who had wrapped the thick towel around his waist. “You can lay down but you can’t sleep.”

“Whatever,” Ronan said.

They made an awkward procession back to Ronan’s room. Gansey carried a thick crystal glass of water from the bathroom, trailing at Ronan’s unsteady back. When they got to Ronan’s room, he looked away as Ronan dropped the towel and pulled on a pair of boxers.

“You have to stay awake,” Gansey said again. He put the glass of water on the bedside table.

“What-ever,” Ronan repeated, a little sarcastically. “You should take a shower or something. You look like shit.”

Gansey rolled his eyes, mostly for show. “Promise you won’t fall asleep while I’m gone?”

Ronan smiled grimly.

 

When Gansey got safely to the bathroom, he shut the door with a resounding _click_ and sank straight to the floor.

It seemed a long time ago that he had strode up the hill, back to the Barns, full of certainty. He had been ready to have it out with Ronan again, so sure of his rightness. His righteousness. So sure he had the answer. A plan. So full of certain words, all of which fell off his tongue when he saw Ronan collapsed. The entire right side of Ronan’s face had purpled indecently and heat radiated off his skin. Gansey had blanched at the damage.

Now alone, his own pain came back to him twice renewed. Avoiding the mirror's glance, he half-drug himself over to the glassed-in shower and twisted the dial to a punishing heat. He scrubbed out the dirt and grime and thick dried blood as fast as he could. His skin scalded pink.

Exhaustion curdled in his belly. A part of him dreaded returning to Ronan’s side but he was also glad for the excuse to go. He could not leave him; he had never been able to.

The room was quiet when he returned. Ronan lay stretched out on the bed, his eyes closed. Vividly, Gansey remembered the morning – was it only just hours ago? – and the memory stung him sharply in the gut. He still could not fully understand it.

“You better be awake,” he said.

Ronan grunted. Gansey grabbed his leather bag off the floor and retreated to Ronan’s capriciously large closet to change. He held his towel clumsily at his waist.

“I’m just going to,” he said vaguely, before shutting the door.

“I think I’ll survive,” Ronan replied.

Safe in the closet Gansey exhaled. He dressed slowly and tried not to think about Ronan’s shoulder blades. Some time passed.

“Are you dead?” Ronan called out.

“Shut up,” Gansey automatically replied. He ran the towel over his hair one last time, and steeled himself.

Of course, Ronan smirked as soon as he opened the door. “Looking good, Dick.”

“Bastard,” Gansey said, reluctantly fond. He imagined he looked the opposite of _good_ \- his swollen skin stretched unpleasantly, surely bruised. In the scant light, Ronan looked almost soft, all the sharpness of his body worn away and a faint smile threatening to disclose itself. Gansey often marveled at this side of Ronan, which revealed itself so rarely. For years now, it had seemed that only he saw this version of Ronan. This was no longer the case – which stung – but for this moment, it was as it had been, all for him, and so nothing else mattered. He walked over to Ronan and sat on the edge of the bed.

“How do you feel?”

“Like shit.”

“Guess that’s my fault.”

“Fix it, then,” Ronan said, another challenge. He seemed to be picking at some unseen psychic scab and it discomfited Gansey, as was probably the intention. He leaned over to the bedside table and opened the drawer. It was empty save a dark grey jar which looked like it contained smoke.

“What’s this?” Gansey said curiously, picking it up.

“For bruises,” Ronan answered. He yawned. “I dreamt it.”

“Is it safe?” Gansey asked.

“Safe as life,” Ronan replied, rolling his eyes.

“Ha, ha,” Gansey said.

He prized off the lid and inhaled the balm’s strong citrus scent, which was immediately and achingly familiar. Citrus and burnt hickory. He cautiously dipped two fingers into the jar; its contents were cool to the touch. He dabbed the translucent ointment onto Ronan’s marked-up skin, gently smoothing it over the scrapes and bruises which speckled his arms. Ronan lifted his shirt up over his ribs so Gansey could treat the long thin gash which ran up his side.

Under his touch, Ronan’s broken skin stitched itself back together and his bruises raced through the rainbow. He leaned forward so that Gansey could cover his back in the salve.

“Do my face,” he said.

“Do my face, please,” Gansey mimicked.

But he fixed his tongue between his teeth and laid his fingers gently against Ronan’s temple. He watched relieved as the swelling began to settle and the bloody violet faded off Ronan’s skin.

“Do you feel better?” he asked curiously.

“Yeah,” Ronan said. He exhaled and settled back into the pillows. “You can use it, too.”

“Oh, how generous,” Gansey said sarcastically. “But I have to do it myself.”

“You’ll manage.”

There was a steeliness to Ronan’s voice. The sharp scent of lemon cut through the air. Gansey felt that he was once again being challenged, and he was unsure of the stakes. He rolled his eyes, mostly for show, and pulled off his long-sleeved shirt. He applied the balm hurriedly and in wide swathes. When he touched the ointment to his split lip, he started at the palpable sensation of healing. It did not close up all the way, but enough. Ronan’s lips quirked in a half-grin.

When he was done, he pulled the shirt back on and stood awkwardly at the edge of the bed. “You probably still shouldn’t sleep,” he said. “Concussion.”

“Yeah, sure.” Ronan rolled onto his side.

“Ronan.”

“Fine,” he said, looking back up at Gansey. “Stay up with me.”

 _Just like we used to,_ he might as well have said.

Gansey got into bed.

 

But of course, they slept: how could they not. They kept the lights on but it was not enough to anchor them to the waking world, and so they went under.

 

He woke to the dream and he was not alone.

He had felt this before – the presence of another in the dreamed world, an intruder – but he felt it more acutely now than ever before. While he could see no one else amidst the flames, he felt the other keenly and it nagged at him like a sore tooth.

He turned his attention to the flames, which threatened to swallow the city like some igneous vine. It seemed that the whole world burned. He felt a relic impulse to charge into the nearest building and rescue its inhabitants from the engulfing flames, but of course there were no survivors. Somehow, he knew this plainly. This world was empty, save the dreamers.

He traversed the smoking rubble, moving toward what he knew to be the city center. (It was a dream.) The city had been razed, levelled to its constituent parts: undone concrete pierced with rusting iron, cracked paving stones. All things disintegrating to a more primal state. The landscape was littered with the detritus of life (scraps of fabric, surviving objects of functional and/or sentimental value, bone and sundry strips of flesh). The sun had gone from the sky – as if it could no longer bear to testify to this world – and yet a pale yellowing cast lit the scene. (The flames gave off no light, seeming to only consume the illumination.) It was toward this light that he walked.

He seemed to know that all this burnt desolation had been wrought by man, a truth which is perhaps unsurprising. It is usually thus.

He picked his way through the wreckage, passing haunted tableaus framed by the bombed-out walls. A kitchen table laid out for repast, chicken rotting off the bone. A bed abandoned in haste, the sheets curled around an absent presence. Candles run down to the wick, their wax spilling over, long cold. He felt chilled by these sparse revenants.

Like a death-snarled siren a chorus rose up from the ruins. For the first time, he heard sound – an echo of life, winding through the rubble. The fearsome voices sang out.

 _Who killed Cock Robin?_  
I, said the Sparrow,  
with my bow and arrow,  
I killed Cock Robin.

He looked around for the source of their refrain, but the scene remained still, save the dancing flames, and otherwise devoid of life. He kept up his steady pace through the broken stone street.

 _Who saw him die?_  
I, said the Fly,  
with my little eye,  
I saw him die.

 _Who caught his blood?_  
I, said the Fish,  
with my little dish,  
I caught his blood.

As the deathly chorus sang, he passed a dome church that had been half-swallowed in flame. Its southern wall had collapsed, revealing the burnt-gilt innards. The high stained glass windows were streaked with melted color, as the Madonna herself wept.

 _Who’ll make the shroud?_  
I, said the Beetle,  
with my thread and needle,  
I’ll make the shroud.

 _Who’ll dig his grave?_  
I, said the Owl,  
with my little trowel,  
I’ll dig his grave.

Next he passed a little curiosity shop with its shatterglass windows. Inside, tiny pieces of doll furniture were piled in high towers. An ornately carved rolltop desk, little beds with soft satin hangings, a table laid out with molded delicacies. Chairs with scrolled feet and mechanized grandfather clocks still ticking out the time. Life in miniature, all painstakingly detailed. The encroaching flames licked at the shop’s foundation.

 _Who’ll be the chief mourner?_  
I, said the Dove,  
I mourn for my love,  
I’ll be the chief mourner.

 _Who’ll toll the bell?_  
I, said the Bull,  
because I can pull,  
I’ll toll the bell.

Up a steep hill to his right lay the tracks for a disused funicular. He could see the hill’s crest, where there had surely once been a platform. There was now a crater in the hillside. A way out with nowhere to go.

He continued on his inevitable path and the ghost-chorus rose up again.

 _All the birds of the air_  
fell a-sighing and a-sobbing  
when they heard the bell toll  
for poor Cock Robin.

As he walked the city, the voices kept on with their song, adding new verses with each repetition, intoning the story of the poor Cock Robin. A fine familiar ash began to fall from the sky like snow. The air looked cold and he felt that he had once seen a picture of this future. This, the day the earth caught fire.

He began to walk more quickly, averting his eyes from the beckoning ruins. He knew suddenly that these little vignettes sought to draw him off the path. He could spend an eternity amidst that death-stalled city, but he did not have an eternity to lose.

He saw the bright tree long before he reached it. Like the rest of the city, it was aflame. It seemed to be in fact the source of the fire, which drove out from its roots. Its seven branches rose skyward like some hell-burnished candelabra.

All light originated with the burning tree; it was this world’s sun and it cast no shadow. In its light there was no shelter. As he approached, those ghostly voices rose up in chorus, louder and fiercer, but now they sang a new song:

 _How many miles to Babylon?_  
Three score and ten.  
Can I get there by candle-light?  
Yes, and back again.  
If your heels are nimble and light,  
You may get there by candle-light.

As he approached the tree, he became even more intensely aware that he was not alone. He felt that another walked his very steps, breathed his very breaths. The rest of the city fell away stone-by-stone, and soon he saw only that burning tree.

Time stalled.

His body was not his own. His body was a borrowed vessel and it had another tenant – and their heart beat as one – their eyes stared out at the same visage – their blood flowed in shared veins – they were not alone. They had never been alone. This thought burned at him, consumed him, filled him up whole where he had never before noticed a void.

He – no, they – walked resolutely toward the tree and when they reached it flame-circled trunk, they did not stop. All presumption of mass and matter gave way. The laws of the universe did not apply and they were not afraid. They were surrounded by flame, passing through a gate into some unknown.

It felt good and right to no longer be apart. To no longer be alone. To perhaps never again be alone. Something warmer than flame took root.

 _How many miles to Babylon?_ sang the ghost-chorus. _Can I get there by candle-light?_

They were now at the very heart of the fire, in the hollow of the burning tree. Overheard – an eternity, massless space, dimensionless heavens – the blackened shadow of a bird. Bodiless voices repeated their refrain as the flame-wreathed wren soared. They found themselves at the center of the universe and not for the first time. Tendrils of fire licked at their skin but they did not burn. They inhaled oxygenless air and they did not suffocate.

 _Three score and ten_ , sang the ghost-chorus. _Yes, and back again_.

As one, always as one, never again would they be alone, so they were devoured by the light, and it was a dream, and then they fell, endless and evermore, and where once there was eternal flame there was now a material darkness, so black it seemed there had never been light, so cold it seemed there had never been warmth, but they were not alone, they would never be alone again, they would always be as they were, together at last and forever, forever, and ever, amen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fragments of quotes and various allusions appear throughout this fic, and here follows a relatively complete list of references, in order of first appearance:
> 
> \- the story of [Theseus and the Minotaur](http://greece.mrdonn.org/theseus.html)  
> \- The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot  
> \- the story of [Sisyphus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus)  
> \- the Litany of St Peter  
> \- [Revelation 18:2](http://biblehub.com/revelation/18-2.htm)  
> \- [the Confiteor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confiteor)  
> \- [Job 41](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+41)  
> \- ["Who Killed Cock Robin?"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cock_Robin)  
> \- ["How Many Miles to Babylon?"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Many_Miles_to_Babylon%3F)  
> \- [the Lord's Prayer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord's_Prayer)  
> \- While not referenced in the fic, I really do suggest listening to music I mentioned at the top, particularly ["Forever" by iceage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EagCKe2Au8E). Also, if you follow that link to my tag for this story on tumblr, you'll find visual references I used for this chapter.
> 
> It is entirely probable I'm omitting something; if you see something you recognize or have a question, drop me a note in the comments, please. (And I mean, while you're down here...feel free to comment, in general. See what I did there? Very smooth.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally, I planned to publish this story in two chapters – now I’m thinking it’ll be three. I’ve also updated the tags to reflect the content of this chapter which includes somewhat graphic description of the aftermath of a suicide attempt (section V) and sexual content (section VI, after the line “‘Tell me,’ Gansey answered.”)
> 
> For a more detailed explanation of the content in section V, please see the end notes.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow  
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only  
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,  
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief  
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only  
There is shadow under this red rock,  
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),  
And I will show you something different from either  
Your shadow at morning striding behind you  
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;  
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

\- “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot

 

“It was easier for Gansey to wrap his head around a Ronan who made dreams real than a Ronan who wanted to die.”  
\- The Dream Thieves

 

### V.

 

There is a point at which the blood meets the concrete. It doesn’t look right, that red. So red it’s criminal. So itself it's definitional. It pools on the concrete and collects. Loose blood, idle blood, spilt blood. Split skin. Open and leaking out all that life-stuff. The color of mortality. It reflects up opaque as a glass-topped lake on a breezeless day. The improbable shade of a mirror.

Crime scene clichés come to mind. Chalk outlines. Slashed to ribbons, beyond all recognition, really did a number on. Mangled. In a pool of his own –

Before. Never had cause to realize that veins are more than just channels full of blood and whatever else travels in it, poison pain and pills, or liquor procured with a sliver of peeling plastic, smoke and exhaust, and veins, it turns out, are like string, and here they unravel. Out of the body, onto the asphalt.

So the body lies at an angle. So the body is broken. Spread-eagled. So the body a rag-doll. Discarded on the empty street like an outgrown toy. So the body without purpose, so the body without function. So the body an object, meat rotting on the bone.

The light in your eyes. They say it goes out when you’re dead and gone, they say you can see it go, that’s how you know, he’s dead, but now you can’t be sure, because his eyes are closed, and so maybe he’s just sleeping, except that red current keeps swelling, every exhalation (still breathing, for now) expelling the tide. And also, it strikes you, in the right light, that he’s never seemed at rest, in all the time –

– you’d like to say, since the funeral or since ______ (you can’t name what precipitated the funeral, no one can, and so it is now just an absence or a void, although it used to be a person or a father, and so is better termed a loss, as in _sorry for your_ ) but you know that really, it’s since forever, in all the time you’ve known him –

– he’s never seemed at rest, really, could that be so, so you try to remember, in the split-second between the impact (his body and blood) and the action (your fingers, two numbers, one repeated twice), if you’ve ever seen him with his eyes closed.

 

The first responder is a person who is likely to be among the first to arrive at the scene of the emergency. An emergency so-defined may include an accident, natural disaster, or terrorist attack, but may in fact be thought of simply as an act of God.

Good Samaritan laws offer legal protection to the person or persons who give reasonable assistance to those who are or may be injured, ill, in peril, otherwise incapacitated, dead or dying, as well as those who have been perceived or imagined to be in such a condition. This protection is intended to offset the bystanders’ tendency to hesitate, waver, or falter, for fear of being wrong, sued, or prosecuted for unintentional injury or subsequent death.

The first responder has usually received some sort of training. The training will not be comprehensive.

The emergency may be brought about by forces natural or unnatural.

The victim may be known by other names. The victim may or may not be at fault. Fault may be defined by paradox.

 

Noah found him. First to the scene, but being in possession of neither training nor corporeal form, he howled right out of existence at the sight of all that familiar blood. Gansey found him next.

 

Survivor’s guilt manifests when a person feels that they have done wrong by surviving an event or experience that others did not. Ghosts or other such apparitions may be in fact considered as manifestations of the same phenomenon – guilt, that is.

 

He called for an ambulance: his fingers, two numbers, one repeated twice. The ambulance came and left Gansey on the concrete with all that blood. He was not family and could not convince the ambulance driver otherwise. Some situations are not amenable to all that charm.

The sirens echoed, the sound left behind, echoing in the trees above.

  

“Don’t you remember last year?” Ronan asked. “When I told you…it wouldn’t happen again?”

“When you tried to kill yourself.”

 

At the hospital, again, they wouldn’t let him in. Gansey chafed at these unfamiliar closed doors, stuck his useless hands in his empty pockets. He was still barefoot, a fact he regarded with detached curiosity, the sort of idle interest he had previously directed at other sites of similar emergency, car crashes and the like. Car crashes and the like, and legends, too: all the things which had momentarily or even enduringly caught his attention, his mind and his money. Atrocities and accidents and apocrypha. All well and good at a remove but now he was barefoot outside the emergency room.

Panic. So this is what it feels like: like water rising in his lungs.

 

“So you let me think you’d tried to kill yourself?”

 

Someone must have called Declan. When he arrived, Gansey thought dully, I should have, I suppose. A motto worthy of the Gansey family crest: I should have. I suppose.

He did not even notice Gansey, who by then had slunk over in an orange plastic chair, his skin green under the fluorescents. Declan swept past the door, which opened for him without question. Overheard the lights hissed.

An hour or two passed and Declan emerged, as purposefully as he had entered, and headed straight for Gansey.

“They said that you found him,” he said.

“I did.”

“He’s going to be fine. He’s – he’s an absolute fucking idiot, that’s what he is,” Declan said. “He’ll be fine and they said he can leave day after tomorrow.”

“How could you possibly say that he’ll be fine. He tried to – “

“He’s fine,” Declan said crisply. “He can leave on Wednesday.”

“What, he’s just supposed to come back to Monmouth like nothing –“

“Who said anything about Monmouth.”

“So you’re going to take him back with you?”

Declan scraped the heel of his shoe – bright black leather, two silver buckles pinned at the side – against the oatmeal-colored linoleum and looked, for the first time, precisely his age. This did not render him any more palatable.

Gansey had never liked Declan very much.  

“No,” Declan said finally. “He can go back to that factory of yours. I have business in the area for the rest of the week and so if there’s trouble. But he will be fine.”

“He has to see, a doctor or something – “

“I believe he is. We are in a hospital, after all.”

“You know what I mean. A doctor, a therapist, to help him – so he doesn’t try to do this, again.”

“They will probably require it.”

Declan began to button up his coat. Outside, it had begun to rain, and Gansey thought briefly of the asphalt, and of all that blood, washed away, as if it had never been.

“When can I see him?”

“I put your name on the visitor’s list. Whenever you like.”

This struck Gansey as unusually considerate. “Thank you.”

“Yes. Well,” Declan said. “You found him, after all.”

 

"Are you ready?"

"What is it that I'm preparing myself for?"

"What's in my head."

  

In 1977 a man threw himself in front of a southbound train and six years later he won almost a million dollars from the city that saved him. The doctrine of comparative negligence as cited in the case held that if both parties demonstrated negligence, despite the life saved, or in fact because of it, damages may be won.

 

### VI.

Ronan woke with ash on his tongue and Gansey stirred at his side.

“What’s it,” he said without opening his eyes.

“Almost eight,” Ronan replied automatically.

Sun-cast dust fell from above as they lay next to each other but at odds. Gansey had been briefly softened by sleep but quick that hard-edged purpose reclaimed his brow.

“We should get up,” Gansey said. Ronan could hear a plan on his tongue.

But the dream. “Do you remember?” Ronan asked.

“How does your head feel?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

(There were certain things which Gansey, for his part, was not yet ready to speak into existence. It wasn’t time. Or maybe there wasn’t time. There was an art to this, the unveiling of secrets or weapons. It was time. Ronan didn’t have the knack, didn’t even have an appreciation of it. The delicate stranglehold of a natural-born politician, the twist of a word or arm. The game. Gansey liked it, and he was good at it, and he wanted – although he would not, could not, admit this, not even to himself – he wanted Ronan to appreciate this. To see how he too could remake the world. But Ronan was brash, stubborn, hell-bent on trampling fine things like silence and china. He had no feel for the art of denial, evasion.

This was, of course, entirely untrue.)

“I think it’s a valid question. You look a little ill.”

“You’re the one who gave me a fucking concussion. And you’re the one who couldn’t stand straight last night.”

Gansey chose to ignore that last remark. “A possible concussion. A potential concussion. Probable, yes, but putative nonetheless. And since someone didn’t want to go to the hospital, so we really can’t be certain. Also, you started it.”

“Because you were fucking with my head.”

Gansey winced slightly. That old chestnut.

That mutinous part of him whispered, _You should apologize_. But that was impossible, of course. Ganseys did not apologize. Not for war, not for money, not for God and not for country, and certainly not for bloodshed in a burnt orange field.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said finally. A compromise.

Ronan rolled his eyes.  “Fine. Whatever. But you were in my dream last night.”

Gansey’s eyebrows twitched. Just yesterday, Ronan had been at his throat for telling this same truth, and now he lay stretched out across the bed, admitting it freely. Gansey wanted to pick at this particular paradox, but instead he rolled over and said, “Don’t you mean _my_ dream.”

“Ha, ha,” Ronan said flatly.  

“But yes,” Gansey said. “I know. I could feel you there.”

Silence congealed and Gansey was suddenly, acutely aware of how little distance lay between the two of them. He could easily reach out and touch Ronan but he did not.

“What do you think it means?” he said.

“Why does it have to mean anything.”

“You’re the one who brought it up.”

“This time.”

“I just don’t see the sense in pretending like nothing’s happening. When it clearly something is. There’s a tree in your living room and our friends are – are missing. And now you and I are having the same dreams. It’s too much to be a coincidence.”

“Fine,” Ronan said.  “What’s your big plan, then.”

At this, Gansey’s heart began to race its staccato rhythm and he could barely will himself to exhale. A mixture of dread and exhilaration filled his lungs. It always seemed to Gansey that in these moments – as he announced the plan, made the speech, tied all those loose threads into a Gordian knot of a bow – he revealed some essential truth of himself which was perhaps better left unseen. Like his gilt had flaked off and the very scaffolding of himself was laid bare.

He knew that ahead lay only danger and uncertainty and yet he could not turn off the path. This willfulness was at once his most admirable and embarrassing trait. Plainly put, he had never been able to stop himself. He had never known when to quit.

It was no accident that Gansey had ordered his life around a quest.

“Well?” Ronan said.

Gansey did not answer. Ronan kicked at his shin.

“I’m thinking,” Gansey said. “About where to start.”

All the disparate points had begun to coalesce and now, at last, he could see the pattern, stretching out like tendrils in the dirt, cracking the concrete above.

 

“Are you familiar with the myoclonus,” Gansey began. He put on his most professorial voice, an effect which was only slightly undercut by his lying disheveled in Ronan’s bed.

“Dick, does this look like biology class.”

“It’s an involuntary muscular twitch. Typically experienced as a hypnic jerk – you know, when you’re falling asleep and you sort of jump awake? And it’s like you’re falling.”

“What does this have to do with my – with the dream.”

“In each of the dreams I’ve had since – well, you know – I’ve felt like I was falling. It’s been suggested, actually, that the hypnic jerk is a vestigial response, left over from when we were monkeys hanging onto trees. We preempt the actual threat of falling with a somnambulistic warning of sorts.

“There’s been some recent scholarship – really interesting stuff, actually, just fascinating – about what they call ‘the high place phenomenon.’ Which is not the most poetic of names,” Gansey mused distractedly. “In any case, it refers to that feeling of – when you’re standing on a bridge or a ledge or anything really high off the ground, and you feel this urge to jump. A desire without desire. You don’t want to jump, but you feel like you should.

“I think,” he said, rounding the corner, “that there is something vital missing from the extant literature on all of this. I think there is a connection between these hypnic jerks, the so-called high place phenomenon – really, we have got to come up with a better name – and what I felt in our dreams. What we felt.”

Ronan shivered slightly at this but Gansey, who had gone trancelike, buoyed by his unfurling thesis, seemed not to notice.

“Consider the prevailing mythos of hell.” He paused, as if he expected Ronan to respond, to play the part of the diligent student in this strange little scene. Ronan, unsurprisingly, did not indulge this fantasy. He scowled until Gansey got on with it.

“In the Greek tradition, the afterlife is imagined below the earth – a literal underworld, beneath our feet. And even further down, there’s Τάρταρος – Tartarus. The under-Underworld, if you will.” Gansey looked momentarily pleased with this construction, and he allowed himself a few scant seconds to smile faintly up at the ceiling before turning back to Ronan. “Similarly, we have the subterranean Sheol in the תַּנַ"ךְ, and of course, the Narakas of the Buddhist tradition, which are typically imagined as a series of caverns underneath Jambudvīpa – i.e., our mortal realm.”

Ronan could not believe that Gansey had actually said the words “i.e., our mortal realm” aloud. He wasn’t even sure which part of the phrase was most egregious, the “i.e.” or what followed. For his part, Gansey seemed entirely unperturbed by Ronan’s increasingly skeptical grimace.

He continued, rhapsodic. “And, just as an aside: the name of the otherworld in Welsh mythology is derived from a Gallo-Brittonic word meaning – _ande-dubnos_ – meaning ‘underworld,’ although there is some dispute over the exact etymology. And, of course, you’re familiar with the Roman lore of Avernus – “

“Gansey. I get it. The sky is blue, grass is green, hell is downstairs.”

“Yes! Don’t you see?” Gansey said.

Ronan did not, but he figured that this was, like most of Gansey’s questions, rhetorical.

“We keep falling. Down. Downward. So where are we going? See, Freud got it wrong,” Gansey said. “About the death drive. It isn’t some biological compulsion. It’s a force. It’s exerted on us. It’s a – a magic of its own kind.”

“Gansey,” Ronan said slowly. “How hard did I hit you? What does any of us have to do with – “”

By now, Gansey had propped himself up on the pillows. He had that half-crazed look in his eye, like he was about to solve a uniquely challenging riddle. This was the purest form of Gansey’s particular wildness, and in spite of himself, Ronan loved it.

“…I mean, obviously, Freud got a lot of things wrong. So that’s not particularly surprising. But what I’m really saying is that the Greeks got it right. It’s Thanatos the Inexorable, drawing you down into death – like a siren. That’s the force of it. Call it what you like. Death drive. That feeling of wanting, needing to jump. It’s all the same. It’s that sense of literally falling in your sleep, out of sleep – so it is a warning, but it’s not just some hangover from our banana-eating days. Death, the afterlife, whatever you call it, is a place _under_ this world, and that’s where we’re falling. The way I felt in our dreams, like I was falling, or being pulled down – it’s all connected.

“When are we closest to death? When we are out of consciousness. When we’re asleep. When we’ve _gone under_. I mean, talk about dying in your sleep. There’s a world beneath our feet, Ronan. And that’s where Blue and Henry and Adam must be.”

“In hell,” Ronan said, affectless. “Or dead.”

“Come on, Ronan. You know better than anyone that we go somewhere when we dream – that there are realities beyond our own. That there are places where the rules of the world don’t apply. Where you can make all of this – “ Gansey broke off, pointing out the bay window to the lilac-misted fields of the Barns, glittering in an unnatural light. “ – flowers that never fade, and land that never ends, and time that never passes – “

Gansey seemed to just stop short of suggesting that the Barns was a deathless place. Ronan thought briefly of his father’s blood on pavement and his mother’s ageless sleep.

“ – because the things you dream, they aren’t alive but they aren’t dead either. Which would suggest that there is something other than life or death. Plenty of mythological traditions imagine this as some kind of limbo realm – or else have stories of living people going into the underworld, and surviving. I mean, you have to have wondered before – where all of this comes from. Your dreams. We know it’s not Cabeswater, and it’s not just the leyline – you’re going somewhere when you – “

“Okay. Alright. I get it,” Ronan interrupted. He looked almost stricken by Gansey’s ruthless dissection, like his very being had been put under a microscope for analysis. Like he was about to be found out. “But they’re not in a dream or hell or whatever, they’re – they’re in the tree,” he said somewhat half-heartedly. He did not seem to believe himself. How could he.

Gansey glowed feverishly. “Precisely. It’s all connected, Ronan. Think about your tree of life – what’s it called? Cran-be-hay?”

“Yes,” Ronan said, gritting his teeth. It seemed that Gansey’s entire life had led to this vomiting up of mythological trivia. He wondered if Gansey really thought he was onto something, or if he’d just finally been consumed by his inconsolable need to solve the ultimate riddle: life itself.

“…In many mythological traditions, the tree is a gate or portal to the spirit domain. In some Celtic folktales, for instance, you would wake up in a faerie realm if you fell asleep in the shade of a certain tree. And of course, of course, there’s Yggsdrasil – the great tree itself, connecting the Nine Worlds of Norse cosmology with its branches and roots.”

“Of course,” Ronan muttered. “How could I forget about the Nine Worlds of Norse whatever.”

“See, your tree – Ronan, I think it’s a warden tree. The varðir – the Norse warden spirits – were said to follow the living from birth into afterlife – like a guardian angel – and warden trees are thought to have similar protective properties. I think you dreamed up a warden tree. To protect us from something here, from that pull of death. There’s something about this place, about the Barns. Can’t you feel it? The way time passes here, it’s like it doesn’t at all, it’s always seemed so strange – and now I feel like I’m only just coming to the surface.”

“So, you’re saying that this tree,” Ronan said slowly, “which fucking ate our friends, is actually protecting them. From Death, with a capital D. Which is in our – my – dreams. But don’t worry, because this magical guardian angel tree left you and me here to – to what, Gansey? Save the fucking day?”

“We’re supposed to go after them,” Gansey said patient, as if this was obvious. And for Gansey, ever-crusading, it probably was.

“What if you’re just telling yourself what you want to hear,” Ronan countered. “You’re the one who said the tree was dangerous.”

“It took Adam. You wouldn’t have dreamed up something that could really hurt him.”

Ronan thought that he would very much like to believe this, contrary to all evidence past and present.

“I’m sure,” Gansey continued. “We’re supposed to follow them.”

“And how’re we supposed to do that?”

Ronan prayed that Gansey would not have an answer this final question. His breath hitched – a rush of fear and shameful elation – at the sure smile on Gansey’s lips.

Gansey always had an answer.

“We go under, of course,” he said. “We dream in the shade of the tree. That’s how we find them. That’s how we save them.”

Ronan almost laughed. Of course, this was the plan. Of course, it all led to this.

 

When Gansey had first told him of Glendower, Ronan had not questioned the dead Welsh king. Ronan had known stranger things – he was a stranger thing – and he had been quietly, gluttonously grateful for Gansey’s eccentricity. They were otherwise seemingly ill-suited to each other, an unlikely pair if ever, the golden boy and the raging shade. But in this, in this, they were perfect complements. Whole. Who else would believe Gansey. Who else would hunt with Gansey.

Now, Gansey clearly expected Ronan once again to set out after a myth. For a brief moment, Ronan allowed himself to imagine that Gansey could be made to abandon the fantastic, the fable, for once and all. What if they woke from this fever-dream with no memory of these interminable days. He imagined Gansey meeting his gaze, laughing, _You believed that?_

He wished, and not for the first time, that there were no dead Welsh kings and no leylines scratched along the earth and no worlds beneath it and no heaven and no hell. No strange black trees in his living room and no dreams in his head.

And still, despite this, he wanted Gansey to be right, he needed Gansey to be right, because the alternative – that he had dreamed up some dread thing which had lost him Adam – was unconscionable. There were not words. He could not bear it.

Because there were vines downstairs and there was magic on this earth and he was a dreamer. And Gansey did not laugh.

“We can’t pretend that this isn’t happening,” Gansey said softly, his words floating up to the ceiling.

“This is insane,” Ronan said. “You’re insane.”

“If I am, so’re you.”

Perhaps. It did seem that they now shared the same disease, this dreamer’s malady. The thought made Ronan doubly sick. Gansey was playing with fire and Ronan could not find the words to warn him.

(He wanted, more than ever before, to hold him in his arms. He felt that Gansey had been bitten by something with poisoned teeth and he wanted to press his lips to the hole and suck out the sickness.)

Ronan looked into Gansey’s eyes and still they gleamed with that certain wildness. Whatever thin screen separating the dream from their waking world had been rent in two and now the nightmares were coming.

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“We can fix everything,” Gansey said, certain. “We have to.”

In the face of this incommunicable divide Ronan could say nothing. He looked at Gansey and Gansey looked back at him and it was like a dare, like a threat. Each seemed certain that the other could not understand the truth of the matter. Ronan watched Gansey’s mouth and wished badly to sew it shut.

“You don’t understand,” Ronan repeated.

The little air between them seemed thick with desperation, and at last, they each sought nothing less than certainty or salvation.

“Tell me,” Gansey answered.

The atmosphere was like so much dead static when Ronan at last breached the space between them. It tasted like finality, their eventual union. This moment had been presaged many times, during sleepless nights at Monmouth and under the leafed canopy of wild Henrietta and in so many words, said and unsaid, both cruel and uncruel, and of course here, here, at the Barns before it all began. Before they were not alone. Before. They loved each other but they hated each other but they loved each other. Before. They were, in some horrible and pure sense of the word, first and foremost brothers, and when they kissed, at last, they spilt shared blood.

Their teeth bruised.

 

It seemed to Gansey that there was a death sentence on Ronan’s tongue, which struck him as incongruously amusing, considering his own much-prophesied death. And yet he had never felt closer to last rites than when he kissed Ronan Lynch.

They struggled, twisting up into one another. Ronan felt rather melodramatically that this was the final battle for his soul. He was not supposed to kiss Gansey – not supposed to want Gansey – and yet he did – but if he pressed his lips to his mouth – then Gansey could not speak. If Gansey could not speak – if neither of them could – then no more nightmares would escape.

While they kissed, the world drained away like sand in an hourglass, until they were alone again, and they were trapped in a tangled, snarling embrace. Gansey had (furtively) imagined a not-dissimilar scene once (or twice) before: Ronan’s beating heart above him, his hands on his wrists, stuttering the pulse, their bodies indistinguishable, their breath commingled. All sharp edges and fleeting terror, and lust, that too.

Gansey’s barely healed lip split back open, and he pinned Ronan to the mattress. He pressed his knees into Ronan’s thighs and held him down. All the while they kissed, each seemingly afraid to give the other up.

Gansey grew hard and was forcibly reminded of the previous morning – Ronan’s ribs, that fanged shadow, the line of his spine. Salt in the air. He felt momentarily ashamed, arcing away from Ronan, who would not let him go, pushing back up into the negative space.

“Fuck,” Gansey said, a harsh consonantal utterance spit clean through the teeth.

“Shut up,” Ronan replied, breathing heavily.

“No,” Gansey said. He felt invincible.

Ronan twisted his hands around the back of Gansey’s head, pulling him down and close with force, and again they kissed like drowning men, desperate to claim the last breath. Immoderately, they touched: all sacrilege and passion: the sweetest honey: oh. Time suspended itself for these violent delights and their violent ends.

They stripped off their clothes. Naked and bare in the sweating air, they thrust against each other a little haplessly. Neither seemed to have any clear objective in mind, so they each grappled for what might be called control.

But this rough incidental contact was not enough, and so Gansey took Ronan in his hand – they were each hard and the air had gone sweet and heavy – said, “Does this,” and Ronan said nothing. But he nodded and copied the gesture, so they lay alongside each other once again and no longer at odds, curving apart like the skin of an overripe peach or the clean opening of a wound, like a door swinging on its hinge, two halves joined at the opening.

“Sorry,” Ronan said breathless, and Gansey swallowed the apology off his lips. They finished one after the other.

In the comedown they seemed to remember themselves. Ronan had thought of (dreamt of) this moment before, but now that it had arrived, the taste confounded. He knew he was supposed to feel ecstatic, like he had been bathed in light or submerged in a warm ocean or otherwise simultaneously soothed and numbed, but mostly he felt a cool knife-edge of guilt somewhere deep. He thought of Adam. His hands raced across Gansey’s back and arms and hips but could not find purchase. Likewise, Gansey seemed unsettled, skittish, and he twitched at Ronan’s touch.

“I didn’t,” Gansey said into the edge of Ronan’s shoulder.

Ronan drew back. “You didn’t?”

“No, I did. I mean, I didn’t mean – “

“I didn’t either – “

“Because, you know, Blue and, and I’ve been meaning to tell you – “

“I know.”

“ – and Adam, obviously, you – “

“Don’t.”

“I just didn’t – “ Gansey said, circling back to the beginning, as if the conversation was only beginning.

For a moment, it looked like Ronan might allow this elision of immediate history. Gansey had pulled away too and now those scant inches of space hung between them. Again, always: impossibly close and certainly faraway. Ronan found that he could not remember which of them had started all of this but he was entirely certain that it had begun long ago. Gansey grappled at the bedside for his little wire-rimmed glasses, which Ronan suddenly and viciously hated. He was of half a mind to snap them in two. That anger came over him like a clarifying wave and in its wake he spoke.

“For once in your fucking life will you just admit you wanted something.”

Gansey seemed rather stunned by this invective and so Ronan continued unchallenged.

“You expect everyone to think that you’ve got it all together. Responsible Gansey. Grown-up Gansey. Golden-boy Gansey. Isn’t it so nice how he takes care of that fuck-up. Isn’t it so cute how he drives that car around. Pays for everything. Fucking dead Welsh kings. He’s gonna be somebody someday, that Gansey. Perfect Gansey. He would never just fucking take something because he wanted it – “

“What,” Gansey interrupted. By now they had both sat up, and they seemed to each forget that they were still naked and so close that their knees knocked. “Hold on, that’s – “

“But it’s all a lie, it’s all complete fucking bullshit, because you take whatever you want. You wanted me to graduate so you took Monmouth and you gave it away. You wanted Blue so you took her. You wanted to live so you took Noah and now he’s gone. You wanted – “

“That is completely unfair, and if you think I _took_ Blue from Adam, you have seriously – “

“Everything’s for sale in Gansey’s world! Everything’s Gansey’s in Gansey’s world!” Ronan spit. “But when your precious little toys break it’s never your fault. It’s never your fault when they do something wrong.”

“I don’t even – “

“You’re just going to sit there and try and pretend like this never happened or like you lost your mind and it’s all my fault, isn’t it? If you get out of control, it’s my fault. I bring it out of you. I make you like this. You’re not like _that_. But I am, right? I’m starting to think that’s why you keep me around, so you have someone to blame whenever you remember how much you hate – “

“Stop this, Ronan,” Gansey said dangerously. But Ronan could not stop.

“That’s why you need me, isn’t it. You never look cleaner and brighter and better than when you’re standing next to me.”

Gansey grabbed Ronan by the back of the neck and pulled him punishingly close. A dull throb echoed in Ronan’s forehead as Gansey drug them together.

“You have to know that isn’t true,” he said.

“Tell me you didn’t want it,” Ronan pressed. They seemed to be speaking of things dissimilar and selfsame all at once. “Or tell me the truth.”

“I don’t understand what you expect from me.”

“Say it,” Ronan said, flecks of saliva striking Gansey’s chin. “For once in your fucking life, say it. Or else I’m out.”

It seemed that their entire relationship had been building up to this ultimatum. This was the moment in which they would either say the bad things or they would walk away from it all. But Gansey knew that there was no word for what they had. In some other tongue, maybe. In theirs, in this, no. Any truth between the two of them was necessarily unspoken and until now they had always accepted this.

“Ronan, I – “ Gansey tried, but the words would not come. He knew that Ronan wanted a truth but he was not sure which to give up.

“Say it.”

They were too close. Even with his glasses, which bit sharply into the bridge of his nose, Gansey could not see Ronan properly. But he could hear his rattling breath and that straining heartbeat, and he could feel Ronan shake slightly from the force of it all, and he could still taste his spit on his tongue, and he could smell the sweat and –

“I used to think I dreamt you,” Gansey whispered. “Before I knew about what you could do. I thought I had dreamt you. Because otherwise it – you – seemed impossible.”

He pulled Ronan close, until there was no more distance to be had.

 

### VII.

Eventually, the world would wait no longer so they got up. They showered alongside one another and dressed quickly. They did not speak of what had transpired.

Downstairs, they ate instant oatmeal in silence. They sat a little closer than they otherwise might have, their arms occasionally brushing.

“So how do you do it,” Gansey said, as if this were a perfectly normal conversation to have over coffee. “How do you dream something on purpose?”

Despite all that had passed that morning, or perhaps in fact because of it, Ronan did not want to sit across from Gansey at the kitchen table and talk about his dreams like they were some commonplace thing. Like they were something that could be explained. But now that Gansey had lighted on this theory, there was no stopping him. Ronan was not even sure if he wanted to anymore.

“I used to just close my eyes and feel Cabeswater.”

“Used to?” Gansey said.

“Cabeswater’s gone now,” Ronan said a little sharply.

“I know. But you’re still dreaming. Where do you go?”

“You should know by now.”

Gansey regarded Ronan a little exasperatedly. Suddenly, as if on a whim, he reached out and grabbed Ronan’s chin. A flicker of surprise twisted Ronan’s brow, and Gansey could feel his jaw click apprehensively. This sort of contact had not been previously advisable, although God knows how many times Gansey had wished to just reach out and grab Ronan, to stop or still him. It seemed now that he could.

“You’re being obstinate,” Gansey said ruminatively.

Ronan shook off his grip. He looked slightly dazed.

“Anyway,” Gansey continued, somewhat smugly. “It almost sounds like you’re daydreaming.”

“I don’t daydream.”

“Of course not,” Gansey replied absently. “You wouldn’t, would you.”

He went quiet for a little while, drifting off to wherever Ganseys went to ponder such things as this. After a few minutes of silence, Ronan impulsively kicked at his ankles under the table. Gansey winced and shot Ronan a look of irritation, which was met, as one might expect, with a smirk.

“Fine, then. How do you do it?”

“I just do it, Dick. It’s fucking magic.”

Gansey raised his eyebrows skeptically, and Ronan sighed.

“I’ve never tried to explain it.”

“Don’t. Just tell me how it feels.”

Ronan looked out the window where fields stretched infinite and inexpressible.

“Like there’s a thread, and if you follow it, you’ll end up where you need to be. I can’t – I can’t…you know how you never never remember your dreams? Well, I do. Usually. That’s the worst part of it, other than the…”

“The feeling, Ronan.”

“I know, I’m getting there. I’m saying that you can’t describe it when you’re awake because it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t belong out here. But sometimes, when I’m dreaming, I can follow that thread – that feeling – to something that…doesn’t really belong in the dream? Some things just feel out of place, like they’re not supposed to be there…”

“But how do you find the right thing?”

“I usually don’t.”

“But you can.”

“Yeah. Sometimes. It’s not like QVC, I don’t just call a fucking hotline and receive my order in three to five business days.”

“What’s it like, then?”

Ronan glanced down at his hands, at his wrists with those smooth leather bands. He looked back up at Gansey. “If you want something bad enough, eventually, you’ll get it. But it’s not always what you expected.”

Improbably, Gansey seemed satisfied by this answer, as if it merely confirmed his own hypotheses. Ronan wondered a little uneasily if Gansey had given all this some considerable thought even before the tree appeared.

“All right,” Gansey said after a little while. He stood from the kitchen table decisively. “It’s time.”

“Time for what,” Ronan asked, although he already knew the answer.

 

Gansey walked into the living room ahead of Ronan. An intemperately pale light streamed in from the windows. Although only a few short days had passed, it seemed that a sheen of dust coated all surfaces save the black branches, which now looked even thornier than Ronan recalled.

Scattered across the room were signs of life before: a black sweatshirt of Ronan’s hanging over the back of a vacant chair, Adam’s car keys glittering on a low bookshelf, one of Blue’s thick gold rings, which she was always twisting off her finger, gathering dust on the floor.

Gansey strode over to the Henry-vine first, laying a palm to its trunk as if he might take its pulse. Ronan hung uneasily in the entryway.

“In the dreams, the trees were like a gateway to whatever came next. It seems logical that this one would be as well,” Gansey said slowly, turning toward the first tree.

“Logical,” Ronan echoed in disbelief or disdain.

“Yes,” Gansey said firmly. “So I think we should try to dream underneath this one.”

Ronan regarded the dark thing at the heart of the room.

“What do you think?” Gansey probed.

“I think – “ and Ronan stopped. He thought of Adam, and Blue, and even Henry. They were gone, and it was his fault, and this was their chance.

“Yes?”

“I don’t know,” Ronan said finally, stepping into the room. “But I guess we can try.”

They each circled the tree. Various myths and legends hovered on the tip of Gansey’s tongue but he kept the silence. Some vein of holiness pulsed in the air.

Gansey sank to the floor and Ronan hesitated for only a moment before following suit. A long black root separated them.

“I’m not tired,” Gansey said suddenly, a little worried. Ronan laughed in spite of himself.

“If you can really do this,” he said, “it doesn’t matter.”

They settled against the tree. When Gansey reached out and took Ronan’s hand, Ronan did not pull away.

“So,” Gansey said. He felt a little silly, like a child playing at grown-up things.

“Close your eyes,” Ronan said.

“Shouldn’t we talk about – about what we’ll do, if we…” Gansey trailed off.

“Either it works, or it doesn’t,” Ronan said. “Close your eyes.”

They closed their eyes. Gansey held tight to Ronan’s hand. It seemed vital that they not be separated, even as that black root ran its course. He felt nothing at first and started to open his mouth to tell Ronan that he was wrong, this was wrong, it wouldn’t work and they would have to –

– but then he felt it, the dark current at his very core, its mercurial tide pulling him in, and under, and out, adrift…

 

He dreamed.

 

### VIII.

He was not alone.

A long grey highway stretched under his feet, bisecting twin plains of ash-fine sand, each of which arced toward the edge of the world. Bones erupted from the dead earth. Great huge curving fragments bleached white by a sun that did not exist, worn smooth by a wind that did not blow. They had some meaning, of this he was sure, but he could not divine it. The language had been lost.

They saw each other in the same moment.

“It worked,” he said.

“I know,” he replied.

“What now?”

“We need a car.”

With these words, the Camaro seemed to constitute itself out of sand, slowly but surely saturating itself that familiar orange. It was the Pig. It was not the Pig.

“Is that how it works?”

“Sometimes.”

They got in the car, and for once, he let him drive it. Inside, it looked precisely like the Pig as he’d last seen it, excepting for an ornate silver cross, which hung on a ribbon from the rearview mirror. It was tied up with a bow, like a present.

“I think this is yours,” he said.

“Funny.”

Just as it seemed unnecessary to decide on a direction, they did not need to name the world or themselves. The words he said might well be the words the other said. In this place they were one and the same, and all roads led to their destination.

“How far is it?”

“As far as it is.”

They drove in relative silence. The car made no noise and the passing air made no noise and so they made no noise. The same light which illuminated the living room back at the Barns cast the ceaseless highway in a pale gloom. They drove for what might have been forever, and it was as if no time or distance passed. Even those intermittent spires of bone began to blur together. He blinked and then –

“Do you see that?”

“Yeah.”

Ahead, an indistinct patch of red had appeared, like a watercolor stain on the horizon. As they continued down the grey highway, the patch solidified into a recognizable octagon. He slowed the Pig-not-Pig and came to a halt just before the sign.

“STOP,” he read aloud.

“No shit,” he said, pointing to the space beyond the sign, where the highway fell out of existence. Just a moment before, he had been certain that the road continued interminable; he had thought they might drive forever. Now there was nothing.

They got out of the car and regarded the sign carefully. His eyes itched. He rubbed at them, and when he looked back at the sign, the letters had changed.

“JUMP,” he said. “Jump?”

They stood at the end of the highway, which was also the end of everything, and looked out into the nothingness, which could not be described, for it did not exist. Whenever he tried to decide on its color or shape or texture, his eyes glazed over. It was simply not.

They exchanged a look. He reached out for his hand.

They jumped. They fell.

  

The unlikely convenience store cast the only light for miles, a sultry sort of neon. The rest of the world had gone dark.

In the landing, he cracked his knee on the asphalt. It did not hurt but as he stood, he rubbed at it absently, and was surprised to see red blood come up on his fingers. But under his touch there was no wound, only unbroken skin, and when he looked again at his hand, the blood was gone.

“Look.”

He looked. High up in the darkness there was a sign. REPENT, it read in towering neon letters. BELIEVE.

He shivered.

“I think that’s yours, too.”

“Shut up.”

They walked toward the store. Through the grimy glass, it appeared to be like every gas station he’d ever driven past on a long dark night. Its shelves were packed with cellophane-wrapped snacks and dubiously labelled energy stimulants and assorted cell phone chargers. At the back, they could see the chill-frosted drink cases. There was no attendant in sight.

It was commonplace, disturbingly so.

“Should we?”

“We’re here.”

They opened the door. A little silver bell rang. He walked over to the counter and called out a hello, but no one materialized. They were alone. He drummed his fingertips along the glass countertop and then looked down.

“Come look at this,” he said suddenly.

“What is it?”

“Come see.”

Under the glass lay a folded blue map. THE ROAD, it said in bright white letters. The corners of the map were worn and soft, like it had already seen considerable use.

“How can I help you?”

The voice came from nowhere in particular and when he looked up, there was a plain-faced woman wearing a red shirt and a nametag that said SUSY. A long moment elapsed. She smiled at him and repeated her question. Finally, he said the only thing he could say.

“We’d like to, um, buy that.” He pointed at the glass. “The map.”

“Going on a trip,” she said sympathetically, pulling the map out from the case.

“Sort of,” he said.

“Would you like a bag for that?”

He shook his head. “How much do I…” he said, realizing that, of course, he had no money.

“Don’t be silly,” she said cheerily. “You already paid.”

He found that as soon as he blinked, he had forgotten what she looked like. Each time he looked up at her, she was unfamiliar. He did not remember paying but supposed that he might as well have.

“And I went ahead and filled up your car,” she added.

“We don’t have a car,” he said, turning to look through the window, only to see the Camaro. “I mean. Thank you.”

“Y’all come back now,” she said with a little wave.

“Thanks,” he repeated, turning away from the attendant. He had already forgotten her face.

They left the store without speaking, and when they turned back, it was empty again. Above, the neon lights flickered. REPENT. BELIEVE.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“I’ll drive.”

The prospect of driving into the depthless night which surrounded the gas station did not appeal to him and so he agreed. But as soon as they had climbed into the Pig-not-Pig, the asphalt cracked open and swallowed them whole.

 

They landed, car intact, on yet another road. He exhaled sharply at the impact, which did not hurt, and yet. He pressed a hand to his side and felt something sticky and wet. When he looked down, there was no blood. He ran his fingers surreptitiously under his shirt along the skin. There was no wound.

“Are you okay?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

This road was made of gravel and reddish dirt. A sun swelled above, bathing the world in its orange light. Beyond the road, he could see dozens of strange half-tamed trees. Gnarled wood smoothed out into half a chair, or most of a bed, or a gilt-gold picture frame. It was as if a carpenter had started to work his craft straight from the source and then abandoned the project.

He opened the car door and climbed out. He wanted to get a better look at the trees – there was something about them – unfinished, wild – and he needed to see, to get a closer look, to be sure…

“Gansey?”

The sound of his name, spoken for the first time in this place, startled him. He had wandered a fair distance from the road.

“Coming,” he said. He took one last look at the trees, which now resembled so much dead wood. He jogged back to the car. “I thought I saw something. Sorry.”

Ronan shrugged. “Let’s go.”

The car came to life soundlessly. Gansey looked over at Ronan and then back at the trees and felt a pang of loss. Up ahead, the red road curved around a pile of cragged boulders.

They drove. Gansey fiddled with the radio dial but all they got was static.

Night never seemed to come to this place. It was unending sunlight, clementine-bright. The red clay landscape was marred only by those sharp-edged boulders and there were no clouds in the sky. Occasionally, at the corner of his eye, Gansey thought he might see those dead gold trees, half-formed and dreadful, but whenever he turned to look at them, they had gone. He did not mention this to Ronan.

“Where do you think we’re going?”

Ronan glanced over at him. “Wherever we’re supposed to be.”

Gansey did not bother to ask him how they would know when they got there. It was, after all, a dream. So they drove.

  

He did not see the accident coming.

 

Metal twisted into an enduring scream, echoing off the boulder which had sprung up in the middle of the road, unseen. In his last moment of consciousness, Ronan thought it sounded familiar.

  

There was a sharp flash of light, and then there was nothing. They did not fall so much as disintegrate, pulverized into so much stardust.

  

They were reconstituted on a pearlescent beach. Gansey woke first and saw Ronan’s body spread-eagled on the sand. Above Ronan’s prone form, he thought he saw birds, great black carrion things, picking at the carcass – or in fact, flying out of it, like they had been born from a nest in his ribcage. He tried to call out to Ronan but his throat strangled itself into a whisper. Blood trickled down his lip. He shut his eyes, unready for this new world.

  

When he woke again, Ronan stood over him and the blood had gone.

“Gansey,” he said, looking more like his father than ever before. Gansey blinked and Ronan’s features settled back into that familiar countenance, just a shade off the original.

“Where are we,” Gansey said hoarsely.

“Wherever we’re supposed to be.”

Gansey stood up shakily, steadying himself on Ronan’s outstretched arm. His fingertips scraped over those black leather bands, which he had always hated. He thought momentarily, longingly, of ripping them off Ronan’s wrist. He did not, of course.

“Are you – “ he began.

“Fine,” Ronan said, before he had a chance to ask.

A glass-green sea lapped at their feet, stretching out into another boundless infinity. Gansey was getting tired of these forevers, these unending planes. He felt small and inconsequential in the face of it all.

Above the beach, a high cliff hurtled skyward. The stone was bright, brilliant, blinding white. As his eyes adjusted to the onslaught, he could pick out the staircase on its face, tiny shadows in the stone. He followed it up, and up, and then –

There it was. The black-branched tree.

“We have to get up there,” Gansey said finally.

“Looks like it.”

Gansey did not want to go. He would have given anything to be back on that red road. But they were not. They were here, and this was undeniably the end.

They began their ascent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **On section V:** In this section, there's a description of Ronan's suicide attempt (which is how I choose to interpret that particular canonical event), as well as a scene set at the hospital immediately afterward. Please read with care. The story picks up in section VI as left off at the end of the first chapter, and so this section could be easily skipped.
> 
>  **Notes:** Some material in section V was taken from the Wikipedia pages for First responder, Good Samaritan law, and Survivor guilt. A couple lines were taken verbatim from The Dream Thieves. Additional information about the account referenced in the final paragraph of that section can be found [here](http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/22/nyregion/man-who-tried-to-commit-suicide-wins-settlement.html); I adapted some lines from that article directly. Various things referenced in section VI can be found via Google; I didn’t keep a good list of my sources while writing that section, whoops. The Shakespeare reference is a Shakespeare reference.


End file.
